


spit on that cut

by myadamantiumheart



Series: The Good Doctor [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Mob, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, BAMF Nohara Rin, Dubious Morality, Explicit Consent, Getting Together, Jumping narrative, Light BDSM, Medical Procedures, Multi, Mutual Pining, Pegging, Polyamory, Switch Hatake Kakashi, Switch Obito Uchiha, Threesome - F/M/M, brief depiction of torture, insatiable horny idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:56:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 48,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26037523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myadamantiumheart/pseuds/myadamantiumheart
Summary: Dr. Rin Nohara knew she was going to run into trouble when she accepted a clinic position from the princess of the infamous Senju family, Dr. Tsunade Senju. She just didn't know that trouble was going to be this handsome, or this intent on squeezing into every single part of her life.--Or, team Minato Mafia!AU. Rin is tired and better than anyone deserves, Kakashi and Obito are way too horny for their own good, almost everyone has ambiguous morals, and some good polyamory is the order of the day.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Nohara Rin/Uchiha Obito, Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Obito
Series: The Good Doctor [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907677
Comments: 47
Kudos: 102
Collections: naruto favs





	1. November, December

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all, this idea has been haunting me throughout my quarantine Naruto re-watch because I really want Kakashi and Obito and Rin to be happy and in love. I keep reading fantastic Naruto mafia AU's and I got inspired.  
> Also, I fucked completely with the age ranges and timing of people's existence, so age ranges for reference:  
> Kakashi, Obito, and Rin: 24-25  
> Itachi and Shisui: 18-19  
> Minato and Kushina: 35  
> Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura: 6-7  
> Shizune, Kurenai, Asuma, Tenzo, Gai, Genma, etc.: all in their twenties  
> Jiraiya, Orochimaru, Tsunade: 45-ish  
> Madara and Hashirama: 55-ish  
> Tobirama and Izuna: 50-ish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rin turns 24 and gets more than what she bargained for. Obito gets to flirt with a pretty girl, and Kakashi gets tired.

At ten AM on Rin’s 24th birthday, she had been flying high on a combination of expensive coffee that Shizune brought to the clinic, the thrill of finally seeing Dr. Nohara emblazoned on the door, and the knowledge that she was officially the youngest resident from the Konoha Medical College to make it to fellow since Tsunade’s prodigious run there over 20 years ago. She’d snapped a picture, texted it to her grandfather, and straightened out the silver nameplate on her new desk. At ten PM that same day, a mere twelve hours later, she was sitting in the back of Tsunade’s beautifully clean Range Rover, frantically tightening her belt around the rapidly bleeding thigh of a one-eyed man she didn’t know while shouting directions at Shizune on how to press an absolutely gaping stab wound shut with the expensive fabric of Rin’s new cashmere cardigan as their mentor cussed out her (lover? husband? best friend? mortal enemy?) in the front seat. 

“Sorry about your birthday, Nohara,” Jiraiya said genially, twisted around in the passenger seat to watch his associate grit teeth and wheeze through the pressure of Rin’s belt getting pulled tighter and tighter, an impromptu tourniquet. “I swear I had someone check out the restaurant earlier this week for Tsunade. Didn’t think that Kumo was going to make such a fuss about a little birthday party.” Tsunade reached out an angry hand to smack Jiraiya across the shoulder, hissing curses under her breath as she turned down the main street that led to the clinic. The man under Rin’s hands grinned sharply through his clenched jaw, his unfairly attractive face marred by swirling scars that glinted silver under the streetlamps. His hair was black, the back of a raven’s wing in the darkness of the backseat, teeth straight and dangerous and a little bloodied. He reminded her, in that moment, of another frighteningly handsome man she’d met before through Tsunade and Jiraiya. This was a son of the Uchiha, she would bet without a doubt, although he didn’t have the same curly hair as Kagami. 

“Probably not the celebration you were looking for,” the Uchiha rasped, hands clenching against the blood-slippery leather seats, and Rin laughed despite herself. The blood was finally slowing, and she could tell from the drooping eyelid that this guy, whoever he was, was probably feeling the full effects of the adrenaline come-down. She wrapped a finger around his wrist with her free hand, checking his pulse again. A little thready, far too fast, not too shaky. He was doing remarkably well for a man she’d seen literally fighting for his life against several larger Kumo men a few short minutes ago.

“No,” she said, clear as a bell and straight in his face, shaking his wrist a little with her hand in an attempt to keep him focused on her. “Not exactly. That’s okay, though. You’re never off duty when you work for a Senju, after all.” 

“Don’t I fucking know it,” he slurred, dropping his head back against the seat as Tsunade pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car with a squeal of the brakes, right in front of the clinic entrance. “And you only get t’ meet pretty girls when you’re bleedin’ on em.” 

“Don’t let Kakashi hear you talking like that, Uchiha,” Tsunade warned, flinging the car door open, an undercurrent of worry in her voice belying the shallowness of the anger that twisted her ageless face. Ah, Rin had guessed right, then. “He’ll get jealous.” 

“No he won’t,” Jiriaya snorted, helping Rin from the car and dragging the Uchiha out of the back seat, hauling him over one broad shoulder while Shizune fumbled with the keys and yanked on the clattering glass front door. “Come on, kid, keep talking for me here,” he coaxed, pushing Shizune down the hall at a rapid pace, fluorescent lights flickering to life above them. Rin looked at her cardigan on the floor of Tsunade’s car, soaked with drying blood and the smell of iron- at the birthday card from her grandfather that she had saved to open until after dinner- at her hands, stained rusty red- and followed them into the clinic, leaving Tsunade to repark her car somewhere it wouldn’t get towed by the parking lot security guard. She could hear the slurred jumble of the Uchiha talking, the clink of glass and the rubbery snap of nitrile gloves as Shizune rustled through the drawers in the first exam room, looking for extra 16 gauge needles. 

The supply closet had a box of suturing materials, enough to clean up the gash on the Uchiha’s thigh, and a spare white coat she could throw over her clothing. But, looking down at the way blood splattered across the purple and gray of her skirt, it wasn’t really worth doing the laundry. Her clothes were never going to recover from those pervasive rust red stains anyway. Back in the exam room, Jiraiya leaned in close to the other man, gripping his jaw in one large hand and talking to him in low, clear tones to keep him conscious and engaged. It occurs to her that Jiriaya knowing how to keep a patient out of shock is just another warning sign she should have noticed years ago, back when Tsunade was just her mentor and Jiraiya was the affable older man that brought Rin lattes from the cafeteria when he would come to bother Tsunade for something during her break. As Rin shuffled into the room with her supplies, Shizune settled on the other side of the exam table, fitting a needle cleanly between a stripe of keloid scar tissue and the crook of their patient’s elbow so that she could start the fluids she’d already hooked over the spare pole. Slamming through the bottom drawers, Rin pulled an irrigation bottle full of saline, numbing cream, scissors, bandages out in quick succession. 

“Minato’s gonna kill you for being careless with his boys,” her boss said from the doorway, dangling her keys from one hand and eyeing the four of them wearily. It seemed a shame to cut what were clearly designer jeans, but Rin did it anyway, slicing a bigger hole around the Uchiha’s wound and tossing the ruined fabric into the biohazard bin. “You got this, Nohara? I’ll have to ask Suzume to order more supplies, I think that’s our second to last box of suturing material.” 

“Sensei is-  _ fuck,  _ ow, geez- way too nice to kill Jiraiya,” her patient laughed croakily, wheezing a little in pain as she flushed his wound with water and wiped away the coagulated blood gently. 

“He’s had worse anyway,” Jiraiya said, thumbing across the man’s scarred jaw with a paternal fondness seeping into the corners of his expression. “The Uchiha are tough bastards, as you well know,  _ hime _ .” Tsunade didn’t say anything at all to that, her jaw tightening as she watched Rin check the thread of her needle and carefully pull the edges of the knife wound back together. It had missed the artery by a bare centimeter, more luck than anything, and in the silence of the room punctuated only by her patient’s hissing breaths, she contemplated how close this man had come to bleeding out under her hands. Finally satisfied that the man’s blood pressure was stabilizing when Rin got half-way through her sutures and the fluid bag was a little emptier, Shizune left to get changed in the staff lockers in the back. Tsunade jerked her head towards the front office. 

“A word, Jiraiya,” she said, shoulders stiff. “Nohara has it under control. She’ll yell if she needs us.” 

“Such trust for your student,  _ hime _ , you must be proud,” Jiraiya laughed, a little hollow, but he straightened up and shifted Rin’s patient a little more onto the center of the exam bed, following the doctor out of the room. With just the two of them in there, jagged breaths between them, Rin could hear again- the drip of the faucet where she’d scrubbed her hands, the plinking sound of the IV drop rate, the subtle hissing of the still deflating blood pressure cuff. 

“Nohara,” he murmured, still a little slurred, after another minute of careful stitching and pulling on his tense thigh. “You got a first name, right?” She huffed a laugh, knotting a suture and moving on to the next one. 

“Yeah,” she said, concentrating on matching the tissue well enough to prevent even more scars on a man who had clearly gotten more than his fair share of them. “Should I give it to you?” He laughed until he wheezed, punched out of his stomach, teeth shining like a wolf under the exam room lights. 

“Nah, I like a challenge,” his head rolled to the right, one eye opening to stare right at her. There was a wet smudge of something on his eyepatch, the fabric too dark to see, but Rin would have bet a million bucks that it was blood, too. “This isn’t your first rodeo, hmm?” 

“Tsunade was my attending,” she squinted, not liking the look of the fat visible beneath muscle and skin and blood in the last little bit of his wound. “You think I’m surprised by the sort of things she and Jiraiya get into? Usually I’m a little more… removed, but I’m not a fool.”

“You’re too young to have your last name on that door and still be that stupid,” he agreed. He smiled at her through a tight jaw, and she was struck, suddenly, by how starkly the scars on his face stood out. “Maybe that means I’ll get to see you again.” 

“No offense,” she said, half-smiling as she finished up the last suture and started cleaning more thoroughly around the wound. “But I hope you don’t. It’s better for all of us if you don’t- especially Jiraiya.” As if on cue, her mentor’s voice rose, echoing down the tiled hallway from the front office. 

“-didn’t want her involved, Jiraiya, she’s so  _ young- _ ” 

“-it’s a little late for that, Tsunade, you know she’s capable-”

“-can’t blame me for wanting to let her have a little time, she’s just gotten out of residency-”

“Fuck,” the Uchiha groaned, letting his head flop back against the bed. “They have  _ got _ to fuck more often, this shit is ridiculous.” At that, Tsunade appeared in the doorway, cheeks flushed pink and fists clenched. He can’t quite manage to work out whatever other words he wanted to say to the pretty doctor wiping down his leg, so the man on the bed stays silent in the face of Tsunade’s wrath.

“I’ll take it from here,” she says. “You should get home and get some sleep, you’ve got an early patient at 7:30 tomorrow.” 

“He’s out of the woods,” Rin straightens, tossing the rest of her soiled materials and stripping her gloves, glancing back at that one dark eye staring her down with startling intensity for someone still struggling with blood loss. “Should give him a course of Augmentin-Duo, I think, and follow up in a week’s time to assess wound care.” 

“Thanks, Nohara,” Tsunade claps her shoulder, leaning in against her briefly in a rare display of physical affection. Outside the clinic, Jiraiya is sitting on the curb, smoking a pipe that he’s apparently produced from nowhere. She stops for a moment next to him, breathing in the smell of clove and tobacco. His hair looks like starlight under the sodium street lamps, face rather more lined with stress in this moment than she’s seen before. Usually, the older man is smiling when she sees him- picking up Tsunade from work, or bothering her in the hospital cafeteria where she fills in on trauma surgery rotations, or slouching next to Orochimaru at a crummy bar after a long day of paperwork. 

“Make sure he takes the antibiotics,” she murmurs, after a minute, patting his shoulder with a disinfectant-scrubbed hand. “That was a nasty slash. They were aiming for an artery, you know.” 

“I know,” he says, weary and yet still friendly, bent Atlas holding the weight of more things than Rin cares to think about. She knew what she was getting into, letting Tsunade become her mentor, letting Jiraiya get friendly with her, letting Shizune talk her into joining the practice. She knows that the Senju are a force in this city, that they ally with the Uchiha, that both families are bad news and their begrudging partners the Akatsuki are more trouble than she could ever hope to outrun. But she remembers, as the midnight wind scrapes across the back of her neck with unflinching nails, the way Tsunade had looked when she told her that doing this job, working a little bit outside the bounds, would be the most rewarding, direct work she’d ever do. Tsunade had been right- Rin has never felt more able to reach out into a community, to skirt rules in order to get people medicine, to quietly slip an order in for physical therapy aids she knows are expensive and have them show up with no questions asked, to know that she’s working with doctors who will never turn a patient aside because of money. “He’s lucky we were there with you, Rin.” 

“Tsunade could have fixed him up,” she shrugs, shivering a little. She’s never been one to brag about her skills (even if there’s always gossip about her catching up to Tsunade and Shizune, overtaking their records, overdoing herself time and time again.) 

“Well, I’m sure Obito still prefers your beautiful face over a Tsunade’s scowling one,” Jiraiya chuckles, knocking a companionable elbow against her leg. “Go get some sleep, kid. I’ll have the boys make it up to you.” He gestures at the trash can by the door, one sleeve of her bloodied cardigan hanging out where Tsunade must have dumped it. 

“Only if you sleep first, old man,” she grins, a little wild where her one longer canine glints over the curve of her lip, every bit the woman that Jiraiya knows Tsunade saw when she was a sleep-deprived, coffee-addicted prodigy at the college of medicine. He watches her go, eyes heavy on her back all the way to her beat up Prius with its farmer’s market bumper sticker and old fashioned prayer beads hanging from the rearview mirror. Her grandpa wouldn’t want to know what the beads see her drive home from, in this old car she inherited when his wife had passed away. He might be proud of her, in his own oblique way, thinking about all the people she can help who never would have had the resources for it. But this, the blood and the knives and the way she knows full well that Kumo had jumped Obito (Obito, Obito Uchiha, now that she knows his  _ name _ ) because he’s a boy of two Konoha families that have their fingers deep in dirty money… he would hate it, not in the least because her parents died at that hands of a drunk driving trust fund son from Kumo with too many connections and too many investments to ever pay the price for their lives. 

Her townhouse is quiet when she pulls up, month old magazines on the kitchen table and an art textbook that Kurenai had left behind last weekend flipped open to a picture of the Willendorf Goddess. She drops slightly bloodied shoes next to the door, padding in on stockinged feet and staring at the stone woman while she downs a glass of cold water from the filter, and then another. This morning, she had admired the way her new purple skirt looked, the way it made her hips look like that- curvy and feminine and less something she struggles with in the mirror today than most days. The gentle bow of her stomach looked inviting under the fabric, soft like someone might want to touch it, and the skirt’s slit showed off the fact that those hours lifting in the community gym to de-stress after Tsunade forced her to memorize yet another case study were paying off. This morning, Rin had thought about drinking with Tsunade and Shizune at the restaurant, celebrating her victory, and getting bold- letting them push her towards someone at the bar who might appreciate the way she looks under her white coats and the matronly blouses her great-aunt made for her, specifically for the office. Someone who might think of her as a woman, as a Willendorf Goddess, rather than the prodigy doctor who always wore purple scrubs for procedures, matching the perpetual bags under her eyes. Who hadn’t fucked anyone since she was nineteen and had some sense of free time in between studying, studying, studying. 

Instead, she gulps down the last of her water and pops two milligrams of melatonin and strips her clothes off by the laundry machine, dumping them in a bucket and pouring a little peroxide over the stains. The skirt is probably shot. But this is the job she signed up for, and she doesn’t really regret it- not when Tsunade pays her well enough to get herself ten more of them by the end of the week. 

When she falls asleep, that single obsidian eye watches her, and in her dreams, they are alone in the exam room with an endless wound under her hand that she can never manage to stitch up all the way. 

* * *

Rin doesn’t think about him that much, after that night- it’s better not to, because most of the Senju people don’t come to her anyway, unless they’re seeing her for primary care like Mito or Kushina. So she makes it the entire week before she sees him again, before she’s just as blindsided as she had been in their first meeting (a sudden shout, Jiraiya leaping out of his seat, smoky air in the restaurant and blood splashing on the floor). Tsunade left her a blank patient file with a list of the recommendations Rin gave on them, a post-it note as thanks, and a check for the exact amount that cashmere cardigan cost her, marked out in her name with “sorry for the party-crashing” scribbled on the notice line. The signature was truly incomprehensible, even if she thought it might have said Obito Uchiha, even if she squinted hard and turned the check slightly to the left. Tsunade had gone with Augmentin-Duo, wound care instructions, extra bandages, and a week’s follow up, and naively, Rin had assumed the follow up would be done off clinic hours while Tsunade was finishing up her paperwork at the end of the night. 

At six pm, Shizune hands her the last patient file of the day on her way out the door. Suzume is doing inventory in the stock room, and the light in Tsunade’s office is on but the low hum of her voice through the door tells Rin that she’s talking to someone about off-the-clock business. The patient file is pretty blank, all things considered. Tall man in his mid-twenties, mid-range blood pressure, occasional smoker, previous history of coming in for routine vaccinations. She’s never seen his chart before, although that’s not entirely unusual. He’s here for wound care and suture assessment, but there’s no initial consult listed on the file, so she assumes this is a follow-up for an emergency room visit. Through the door of the exam room, she hears two men talking- he probably brought his partner, whoever the emergency contact number on the front of his chart is- as she knocks. There’s a murmur of assent before she swings the door open, and there-

“You’re not-” she says, stalling in the doorway, and the Uchiha on the exam table just grins at her, that familiar sharp thing she’s been thinking about all week. There’s a silver haired man beside him, wearing a fabric mask that covers the lower half of his face but can’t hide the nasty scar running down from his forehead through his eye to his cheek. Rin looks down at the chart, then back up, stepping in just enough to let the door close behind her. “I know damn well your name isn’t Tobi Karasu.” 

“Leave it to Jiraiya to ruin the game,” Obito smiles, tilting his head and watching her with his one curious eye, the one that had haunted her sleep so thoroughly last week. His code name on their files is apt, then. It is the eye of a crow, a raven, or perhaps a bird of prey seeing something shiny and delicious enough to warrant the effort of diving below the cloudline. “Now that you clearly know my first name, and I never got a chance to find yours.” The silver-haired man rolls his eyes slightly, leaning back in the chair, never taking his hand off Obito’s uninjured thigh. She sighs, setting the chart down on the counter and pumping soap on her hand to wash up. 

“It’s on my business cards,” Rin offers, glancing over at the easy way Obito lounges, unbothered by how close the other man is. Obito laughs at that, her non-answer seemingly amusing him. She dries her hands, rubbing alcohol gel over them, before extending one towards Obito’s partner, who stares at her like she’d just offered him a knife blade first. “I’m Dr. Nohara, nice to meet you. Are you Obito’s ride today?” 

“Actually,” Obito cuts in, leaning forward, “I’m  _ his _ ride. We’ve got somewhere to be for Jiraiya after this.” 

“Obito,” the other man hisses, eyes darting towards the smug Uchiha. Obito just shrugs again. 

“Shake, Kakashi,” he says, waving a nonchalant hand like he’s commanding a dog. “Come on, the good doctor here saved my life last week, you can at least be polite to her.” Kakashi’s hand is cold, when he grabs hers, just as she’s about to pull back. It’s startling, because Rin’s used to having the coldest hands in the room, but his grip is firm and his fingers cover her hand so fully that she’s briefly shocked by how much larger the two men are than she is. She’s not exactly tall, probably 5’ 3’’ when she’s standing up straight and she gets a good two inches from her work clogs. But they loom, even sitting down, and the weight of Kakashi’s hand on hers only enhances the effect. 

“How- uh, how are your stitches?” She manages to ask, stumbling a little when Kakashi finally lets her go. “Pain, swelling, redness?” Obito shakes his head for all three. “And you’re taking the course of antibiotics?” 

“250 milligrams, every eight hours, with food,” he recites, looking her up and down shamelessly. “Just what the doctor ordered.” 

“Amazing,” Rin remarks, dry as a desert, as she hands him a cloth gown. “I thought it was just the blood loss, but you’re really like this all the time.” Almost against his will, Kakashi snorts, looking away from Obito’s betrayed expression when the taller man pouts at both of them. “Change into this and I’ll be right back to look at the sutures.” 

“You don’t want to help?” Obito offers, shit-eating grin firmly in place. She doesn’t want to encourage him- they really do have work to do here, and she remembers Jiraiya mentioning Kakashi last week, who must be his boyfriend or partner or  _ something-  _ but there’s just something about his tone that manages to make her smile. He really is handsome, unfairly so, and it’s a least a little bit funny to watch her try to wink at him with only one visible eye. 

“That’s what you brought Kakashi for, right?” She says, sweeping out of the room before she can banter back, the way she probably wants to. Back against the door, listening to Kakashi snap at Obito for standing too quickly without his help, Rin has to wonder. Why, exactly, did Tsunade give her this case again? And what are they going to do for Jiraiya, and will Obito get hurt, and when he walks out this door, if his wound is healing properly, will she see him again? After a moment of shuffling clothing sounds, Obito calls her back in, and she can grab her rolling chair and the exam bed light to get a closer look. The sutures are healing well, just a little bit flushed around the edges, and the skin seems to be coming back together better than she would have expected. The area is a little bit warm, but no more so than normal, and the bandages are very, very carefully wrapped around his leg. “I assume he did this for you,” she gestures at the bandages as she unwinds them and discards them in the bin. “It’s a very neat job.” 

“He’s good with his hands,” Obito leers, laughing loudly when Kakashi turns very slightly pink above his mask and appears to scowl. “But actually, yeah. He took good care of me, this week, made sure I was eating right and everything.” 

“He did well,” Rin murmurs absently, turning the light to look closely at every angle of the wound. The area she’d been most concerned about, where it turned deep and angled in towards his groin, is holding up. There’s no sign of weeping from the wound, and in the end, she has to pronounce him remarkably healthy, for everything she’d seen seven days ago. “You can’t have the sutures out yet. It’ll probably be about three weeks with them in total, and you should maintain restricted movement while they heal. The slash was deep and not particularly clean, so you run the risk of scarring more deeply and impinging movement if you go too hard too fast.” 

“I can do that,” Obito turns towards Kakashi, leaning his head in as though he’s going to tell the other man a secret. “As long as you can put up with me needing help for two more weeks.” 

“You always need help,” Kakashi retorts, shifting back. There’s a fondness to his eyes, though, that Rin catches just wrinkling the edges of his expression. The way they curve towards Obito, drawn to his face, watching him as closely and intensely as anything she’s ever seen. “We can do that,” he affirms, after a second of eye contact with his partner. “I’ll make sure he follows up.” 

“It’s very important that you finish the whole course of antibiotics,” she stresses, wheeling back and setting her instruments on the counter as she gets up to wash her hands again and grab more bandages. “If you listen to nothing else I say.” 

“Have a lot of difficult patients, doctor?” Obito asks her, barely wincing when she begins to place the gauze around his leg. She just huffs out a laugh, securing it with waterproof tape and checking the fit with the tip of her finger. 

“No,” she says, filled with the sudden urge to tease him back the way he’s clearly enjoying teasing her. “Just you.” And the raspy, intoxicating boom of his laughter is worth the little tickle of anxiety, of surprise, or perhaps shyness at how Kakashi looks at her with a newly appraising gaze while his partner laughs uproariously beside them. 

* * *

That could have been it. Rin usually doesn’t do suture removal, since that’s a simple visit that their nurse practitioner, Ebisu, likes to handle to save time and effort in the clinic. She definitely doesn’t expect to do Obito’s suture removal, after the end of his three week healing period, and so she’s not sure why the days come and go with a sense of disappointment to them. Tsunade calls her into the office four weeks after she’d treated Obito in the back of her mentor’s pristine car and sits her down to offer her a bonus if she’ll agree to treat patients “referred by Jiraiya.” 

“They were impressed by you,” Tsunade says, over the rim of her reading glasses. Her eyes have the same hard quality they’d had when Rin first asked for advice as a fumbling student, years ago. It’s clear that she’s giving Rin an out, though not entirely clear whether she thinks Rin should take it. Tsunade knows what it’s like to impress people like Obito, like Jiraiya, like (she supposes) Kakashi. She had never quite left the life the godfather Hashirama bestowed upon her, even when she moved towards saving lives as a career while others in the family continued to take them. It is a weight of trust, for a Senju to admit they’re impressed, sure, but also a threat that lurks behind corners and follows you for the rest of your life, however long that may be. “Impressed enough to request your number from me. I didn’t give it to them yet, obviously,” she shuffles the files on her desk. Rin notices that Obito’s is on top, with a large stamp indicating that his course of treatment for his wound had been satisfactorily completed, and discharged. “I wanted to ask you, first.” 

“Off the record treatment?” Rin asks, thinking about the easy way Jiraiya always lets himself in the back door of the clinic. Tsunade nods. “And none of the same fraternization rules, I’m assuming.” 

“No,” Tsunade says, a smile quirking at the edge of her mouth before she shuts it down. That’s more of a jab at the way Rin has caught Jiraiya and her among the filing cabinets way too many times than it is anything else. Obito, after all, has Kakashi. Rin just has her six pints of stockpiled chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, a marathon of cooking shows on her netflix watch list, and, apparently, a contract with the mob. “You’ll agree?” 

“Sure,” Rin shrugs, fiddling with the hem of her sleeve and considering the fact that this is exactly what Shizune told her would happen, if any of Jiraiya’s boys met her. ( _ You’re too gentle,  _ Shizune said to her.  _ You have a perfect bedside manner, and you work quicker than anyone I’ve ever met- even Tsunade- don’t tell her that, though- _ ) Maybe at the time, it was more of a joke than anything else: her, Rin, doing more than keeping the clinic above board and useful to the community. She wasn’t done with residency yet, wasn’t sure if she wanted to go to the clinic full time. There’s a blood-stained skirt in the back of her closet now, though. It’s not really a joke anymore. “I’d be happy to help.” 

* * *

It takes three days and one home invasion before Rin begins to wonder what, exactly, she’s gotten herself into. She comes home from a half day at the clinic, overjoyed at the prospect of puttering aimlessly around the house all afternoon, to find her front door unlocked and two familiar men lounging on her couch. For a moment, she just stands there, looking at Obito flipping through channels on her television while Kakashi sprawls next to him with a book she recognizes (Jiraiya’s work, of course) in hand. It’s a signed copy of the latest in the Makeout Paradise series, a gift Jiraiya had given to the entire staff of the clinic- the extended cut black cover edition of Icha Icha Strap. For a man who’s reading something so trashy, Kakashi is remarkably stoic, even when she clears her throat and the two of them look up at her. 

“How are you in my house?” she asks, somewhat helplessly, letting her purse fall to the ground and kicking off her Danskos. She folds her coat onto the entryway bench, a little self-conscious of the plain gray shirt dress and leggings she’s wearing for a reason that, in the moment, escapes her. 

“Tsunade-hime gave us your number,” Obito says, perpetually smug grin on his face, like that explains how they’re sitting in her living room. 

“Did she also give you a key?” Rin rolls her shoulders, walking further in to see what they’re watching. Surprisingly, it’s a design show, something about creating dream gardens in urban spaces. Kakashi laughs a little, the barest hint that he’s even paying attention to them, before shutting his book. 

“Show Rin your finger,” he says, turning his steel gaze on his partner, even as Obito frowns at him for ruining his fun. “We do actually have a  _ reason _ to be here.” 

“At least come to the kitchen, there’s better lighting in there.” She grabs her first aid kit- more like her first aid rolling cabinet, the one her grandpa had built her when she moved to the city- and pushes it out of the pantry onto the kitchen tile. “Not just here to bother me, then?” 

“Not that I don’t love bothering you,” Obito sits at the table, rolling up his sleeve and holding his hand out. “I would have preferred a social visit over this. You’ve got a nice place. This whole townhouse, just for you?” He whistles, low and impressed, as she takes his hand gently between hers and begins to palpate the swollen knuckles. There are little bits of what look like brick dust stuck in a few small abrasions, but they’ve clotted over nicely. What’s more concerning is the lack of movement in his middle finger- it’s probably broken. 

“Just ask her if she’s single outright, Obito,” Kakashi drawls behind them, shuffling forward to set her Icha Icha copy back down on the sideboard. “You’re  _ not _ subtle.” Obito chuckles through his own pained hiss, wincing when she presses down on the purple-blue-black of the back of his hand and giving her another one of his exaggerated, goofy winks. With just one eye uncovered, they should really just look like painful blinking, but somehow Rin gets the idea anyway. She rolls her eyes at him, splinting his finger carefully and cleaning off the abrasions. Here in her kitchen, Kakashi seems looser, more open somehow here than he had back at the clinic. Perhaps he actually trusts her- or, more likely, he’s confident in his ability to control the situation when it’s just the three of them and she’s so clearly at a disadvantage. Tsunade trusts them, she thinks, so she’s going to try to as well. 

“Should you get an x-ray? Maybe,” Rin concedes, tossing the used cotton balls and bandaid wrappers in the kitchen trash can. “But I’m not going to make you. My…  _ unconventional  _ clients rarely want fussing, and I know you’re busy.” 

“Busy getting hurt, apparently,” Kakashi says, leaning over her shoulder to look at his partner’s splinted hand. The heat of him against her back is sudden, surprising- his hands had been so cold in the office three weeks ago, but he radiates warmth through his shirt like a fire on a winter’s night. She’s a little stunned by his proximity, the way he smells like cedarwood cologne, the brush of his shirt against her bare arm and the way Obito’s eyes darken looking at the two of them. Abruptly self-conscious, Rin tucks her hair back behind her ear and laughs, echoing and fake, crumpling the package of cotton balls as she leans away to put them back in her cart. In the moment, it almost seems like Kakashi will lean close enough to crush her between them, to kiss Obito and trap her there. But he steps back and around her to put a hand on Obito’s shoulder instead, just as she’s beginning to realize that she’s not exactly breathing steadily right now. 

“Next time, please text ahead so I don’t think someone broke into my place,” she tells them. The smug look on Obito’s face and Kakashi’s single visible raised eyebrow leave her doubting that they will. 


	2. January, February

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi gets a concussion and a crush. Rin gets a stupid boy and more responsibility. Obito just gets on the way to what he wants.

Obito goes through her things like a three year old with an endless amount of curiosity, scarred hand around the scented candle Kurenai got her for her birthday, smelling of gardenia and summer sea. He thumbs through all the titles on her bookshelf, cataloguing out how many are medical textbooks, and how many are dime store mysteries. One afternoon, waiting for her to come home from the clinic to address Kakashi’s potential fractured jaw (pipe to the face, of course, fucking Kumo) he goes through her entire fridge, making random comments to a Kakashi would could not appear to give less of a fuck. 

“You think she likes tomatoes?” he muses, sorting through her produce, head cocked to the side like a dog. Kakashi just snorts, unwilling to move his sore jaw, and keeps reading Icha Icha Strap at her dining room table. There are so many fascinating things, new things,  _ shiny _ things for Obito to touch and he is a crow collecting them all in every minute he’s left unsupervised around her dwelling. 

* * *

“You trust her?” Minato asks him one afternoon, while they wait for Kakashi and Genma to return from an errand. His tone is free of judgement, mild as milk, nothing even remotely similar to what Obito’s likely to receive from his family. Truly, there’s something to be said for the fact that Minato has always been capable of acting like the nurturing father Obito never had, giving forth emotion in equal measure to every strange and convoluted conversation Madara ever had with him at the dinner table. Obito thinks he loved Minato from the beginning, for the way he smiled so widely at Kakashi even when Kakashi was glaring back, the warmth of his hugs, the fact that he and Kushina never failed to set out a space for him in the house and make sure he knew it was available no matter what. Naruto is luckier than he knows to have Minato and Kushina as his blood parents. 

“Tsunade certainly does,” Obito replies, kicking his feet up on the arm of the couch like Kushina won’t smack him over the head with a wooden spoon the minute she sees him lounging this way. He’s probably safe for at least another little while, based on the way he hears Naruto’s loud arguing with his mother upstairs over a suspicious trail of mud tracked through the house. 

“I didn’t ask if Tsunade trusts her,” Minato says, vaguely chiding, looking at Obito over the brim of the newspaper he’s reading. Obito doesn’t know anyone else who reads paper newspapers other than Madara. It only serves to underscore the distinctions between the two men even further. If Madara had looked at him disapprovingly over a newspaper, Obito would have been five miles away sooner than humanly possible. 

“I trust her with Kakashi,” Obito says, after a few minutes of thinking, staring at the crack in the ceiling where he and Kakashi had accidentally hit the plaster with a baseball when they were in highschool. He knows that it means more than just saying he trusts her with his own life, and Minato clearly knows that as well, if the way he hums pleasantly in pleased acknowledgement is any indication. “She never seems to be fazed by us, at least.”

“Good,” Minato murmurs, folding his newspaper and leaning back in his armchair. He’s really not that old, barely thirty five, but he looks so comfortable and serene that Obito can imagine it’s what he’ll look like sitting by the fire in fifty years. “It’s hard to find good doctors anyway, so you’d better not scare her off. Kushina likes taking Naruto to see her.” 

“It’s not me you have to worry about,” Obito snorts, shooting a glance at his mentor. “I’m a perfect patient, thank you.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Minato waves, grinning at him, easy smile and easy laugh. Obito knows what it’s like to watch him bare his teeth, has seen him shoot a man point blank in the skull, heard the horrible sound of him breaking a man’s teeth with a baseball bat. He also remembers with crystal clarity the way Minato had looked down at Naruto, the day he was born, swaddled in soft pink and blue and oh-so-precious. For a minute, he and Obito are just a strange father and son, blood spattered family built together by the bonds of a crooked city with poisonous streets. “I’m sure you are, Casanova.” 

Once Minato knows that he trusts her, he stops asking so many questions about why Obito and Kakashi are hanging out at Rin’s house harassing her for all manner of small abrasions and other injuries they would have otherwise let go. Their fascination with the good doctor seems to click, then, probably made clear in parallel to the idiotic way that Minato used to hang around trying to learn every conceivable fact about Kushina back in the day. 

* * *

In her kitchen on a weekend, bothering her for a look at Obito’s black eye, Kakashi watches Obito dance around Rin, smile, leaning and grinning down at her with that familiar sparkle in his eye, and he  _ thinks _ . When they get home, he shoves Obito into the loveseat in the front room, crawls into his lap and pins him there with his words and his hands, and oh- Kakashi is terribly, terribly in love with this man underneath him, blushing wildly at the idea of Rin seeing them like this.

“You  _ like _ her,” he accuses, fitting his teeth perfectly against Obito’s neck and biting down with a hint of cruel promise. “You  _ do _ , I can  _ tell- _ ”

“We hardly  _ know _ her,” Obito pants, desperately fisted hands in Kakashi’s shirt and hard cock under Kakashi’s ass because Kakashi’s  _ right _ , damn it, he’s right about this and Obito wants Rin more than he’s willing to admit. Kakashi grinds down, slow and dirty, relishing in the way Obito moans, free and loose and generous with his sounds just the way he is with his emotions. “She’s been our  _ doctor  _ for like three  _ months- _ ”

“So?” Kakashi murmurs, fingernails scratching down the back of Obito’s arms and thighs clenching tight, holding him closely. “We literally fucked Tenzo like twenty four hours after meeting him.” 

“This is different,” Obito pushes him back, eyes uncharacteristically serious, and suddenly Kakashi believes him- that it is. 

“Different, huh?” he breathes across Obito’s cheeks, kissing him gently across the lines of his cheekbones and the blurry line of his bruises. “I bet you still want her here in between us, though, don’t you,” because he never stops pressing or pushing or poking at Obito no matter what they’re doing. 

“I hate you,” Obito groans. He lets Kakashi kiss him breathless anyway, rolling little motions on his erection and the slightly uncomfortable scrape of their jeans. Kakashi laughs directly in his ear, a whole bastard that Obito  _ loves _ , gets up on his knees and yanks Obito’s head back so sharply it shocks a moan right out of his chest. 

“You don’t,” Kakashi says, lilting and smug. “You want me to fuck you, isn’t that right, ‘Bito? You want me to lay you out and wreck you where Rin can see the two of us.” Obito gasps, whines, flushes so red Kakashi can feel the heat of it on his lips. It’s intoxicating, the amount of power Kakashi has over him in this moment. “You could be a  _ useful _ boy, couldn’t you?” Kakashi asks him, gripping his jaw with a cruel hand, teasing him with the barest brush of his ass over Obito’s lap, lowering himself just enough so that he can catch Obito’s lower lip and bite down on it. “Just a helpful, pretty boy, letting me fuck you stupid until you’re  _ crying _ for us and then maybe she’ll spread those sweet thighs and sit on your face and see if you’re worth her time.” 

“You-” Obito shudders, giving it up for him so nicely, melting into him like ice on a hot summer day, dripping down him and spreading his thighs even wider under Kakashi. “You  _ fucker _ , you’d better put your money where your mouth is-”

“I will,” Kakashi purrs, before he sits up fully and yanks his boyfriend off the couch, they’re not going to fuck here because he has plans, damn it, and those plans involve getting his boyfriend on his belly on their mattress as soon as possible. He yanks at Obito’s jeans with careless hands, tugging them down and flinging them to the side so hard that he’s abruptly grateful they’re no longer renting an apartment and instead own the property, when Obito’s belt buckle collides with the plaster with a dull, hollow thud. They would not be getting their security deposit back, if they even made it to the end of the lease without getting evicted for all the dents in the walls. He never gets tired of the contrast between his pale hands and the flushed pink scars on Obito’s leg, the way their skin looks against the dark sheets on their bed when he spreads Obito’s thighs wide open. “Needy, aren’t you?” He laughs against the curve of Obito’s ass, biting with unforgiving teeth and scraping red lines, luxuriating in the shuddering moan Obito gives up for him. Kakashi doesn’t give him a chance to bite back, just licks a hot stripe across his lower back and gets his fingers around his inner thighs and eats him out until Obito’s tearing at their sheets with uncoordinated hands. 

“Kakashi,  _ Kakashi _ ,” Obito chants helplessly, teeth in the pillow, hips arching into the mattress when Kakashi gets a finger in him and scrambles for the lube that Obito always leaves in the bed (how many times has he rolled over to a goddamn bottle in his back, too many to count probably.) Obito has never been more grateful for Kakashi’s oral fixation, for the way he’ll bite Obito purple, for the hot wet press of his mouth and the filthy words that spill out of it. Back when they were stupid and nineteen, even the horribly tacky things Kakashi got out of Icha Icha books did it for him. They would ruin three sets of sheets in a weekend, sheepishly shoving them all in the washing machine in Minato’s basement and watching old anime on Kakashi’s laptop while the hot cycles ran through, stained and sticky from how Obito had writhed across the bed with Kakashi’s fingers in him and an insatiable thirst for how good it felt to come undone under the other boy’s watch. Stupid of them to take sex advice from Jiraiya’s perpetually corny rag novels, but Kakashi cannot deny how well learning to pin Obito to the mattress and stroke across his prostate has served him. It serves him now, too, when his boyfriend squirms onto his back and drags him in with greedy hands. 

“You know I’ll give you anything you want,” Kakashi murmurs, curling himself over Obito’s stomach and sliding in, getting a hand under his boyfriend’s knee to shove it up like Kakashi could fold his ankles up to his chin. Oh, doesn’t he know- Obito always knows it, especially when Kakashi looks at him with those dark patchwork eyes and promises him the sun, the moon, and all the stars. Obito is nothing but a mess for him, letting Kakashi tattoo his presence on his hip with pink thumb prints and sharp teeth in his shoulder. It’s only fair, after all, for all the times Obito had shoved him up against the back of a bar and kissed him quiet, for every night Obito got Kakashi’s legs over his shoulders and bit his name into the other man’s inner thigh, tugged his nipples cruelly, pulled his hair and teased him until he came untouched across his stomach. Their entire life is payback of some sort, taken and given and adding up to a debt he can never hope to touch, even if he wanted to. 

He thinks about it later, after Kakashi goes to run a hot bath for both of them, naked and lanky and silver in the dim light from the hallway. ( _ You like her, you  _ **_like_ ** _ her- _ ) Kakashi is, as per usual and quite infuriatingly, probably right. 

* * *

It doesn’t take Obito that long to get used to wanting her the way he wants Kakashi: the sweeping curve of her soft hair behind her ear, the freckles across her cheeks, the purple eyeliner she wears on Fridays, the muscle of her thighs under a pair of leggings. He wants her laughter to slide across his skin like a waterfall, trickling down the back of his throat and filling his stomach with butterflies. He wants to see her sit on Kakashi’s lap and bite back at him in that dry, sarcastic tone, to hear her chiding him for his biting wit and blunt nature. It doesn’t take long for Obito to get used to wanting her at all. And, well- Obito sees things more clearly than Kakashi does, always has, even though he technically has half the field of vision. He knows that they both want Rin before Kakashi does, of course, and it takes Kakashi an embarrassing amount of time to catch up. 

One evening while Obito is off having unavoidable drinks with Madara and Izuna, Kakashi sits in Rin’s office with the door open, waiting for the doctor to finish up with her last patients of the day and come assess him for a possible concussion. Late amber light streams through the slits in the window shade, bathing everything in an eerie glow. He hears the clattering of little feet, Rin’s laughter, an unmistakable smile in her voice. 

“Make sure you pick a sticker,” Rin says, warm summer sunshine. She grabs the visit summary off the printer, handing it over to the mother of her final patient, and locks the sliding glass of the front behind them after ushering them out. 

“Do I get a sticker too?” he asks her, when she comes into her office, shutting the door with a soft click and hooking her white coat over the rack. It could be the head injury, but his brain seems to spin worse the closer she gets to him. When he’s sitting down, she’s about the same height as he is, at an eye level he rarely gets to experience, and he absently thinks about the fact that he could easily pull her into his lap like this. There’s a little voice that sounds a lot like Obito in the back of his aching head yelling happily about the idea. 

“If you’re good for me,” she answers distractedly, digging through the pocket of her loose dress for her pen light, seemingly unaware of how that sounds to him. He has to take a deep breath, cut off the sudden urge to slide to his knees here on the office carpet. He could be good for her, he could be  _ very _ good for her. He could easily get her thighs over his shoulders, sink his fingers into the softness of them, put his head under her dress and make her scream for it. He could be so good for her, bring her home to Obito and show her what it feels like to be  _ owned _ by them. She smells like Kushina’s garden in the summertime, roses and sweet peas and vanilla on the warm breeze. It makes it hard to concentrate (or is that the concussion?) so he doesn’t even register her asking him to look up for her until her hand is on his chin and her concerned eyes are  _ right _ there. 

“Hey,” she murmurs, looking at him critically and turning his head gently from side to side. “You didn’t drive yourself here, did you?” 

“Not if it’s going to make you angry,” Kakashi replies, rather dumbly. He can’t remember the last time someone stunned him just by being so  _ close _ . She just huffs a quick, annoyed breath through her nose and asks him to look up again, shining her penlight in his eyes. In his somewhat dazed brain, the blinding white of it feels just like seeing her grin for the first time at one of Obito’s dumb jokes. Oh-  _ oh _ . God, Obito had been right weeks ago about them. When the light is gone, he sees spots, wavering stars against the backdrop of a June night, velvet swimming around her face and a halo spanning her forehead like a flower crown. 

“Stand up for me, honey,” she says softly, his ears catching on the worry in her voice before sliding, slipping over to the part where she called him  _ honey _ . He tries his best (walking in hadn’t been hard, but now the room tilts a little bit when he gets himself upright.)  _ I’ve got to tell Obito _ , he thinks, even as Rin coaxes him back to sit down after watching him sway there for a few seconds.  _ He’s going to be  _ **_so_ ** _ jealous _ . 

“Well, you’re not going to be driving yourself home, at least,” she marks a few things down on his chart and turns to grab something off her desk. “I can already tell you’re dizzy. Nausea? Memory loss? Headache?” 

“Head feels like shit,” he confirms, letting his eyes slide down her back while she fiddles with another pen. His head feeling like shit doesn’t stop the unbidden thought that she’d look really good bent over her desk. Obito often accuses him of having an oral fixation and he has to admit that there might be some truth to it. He’d love to flip her skirt up and drag her panties down, just have his way with her, rim her until she’s sobbing for him and dripping down her legs onto his face. The daydream is nice, sweet and hot and  _ very _ compelling, until she ruins it by turning around and grabbing his car keys right out of his jacket pocket. If Obito were here, he’d laugh at him for getting caught out like that. 

“Come on,” she says, pulling her satchel off the rack and hooking it over her shoulder. “I’m not leaving you alone until Obito gets back from whatever hell he’s raising.” Her fingers grip his forearm gently, pulling him slowly towards the back door of the clinic. It’s strange to fold into the passenger’s seat of her car (every time before, he’s thought about his truck, the seeming obsession Obito has with the idea of putting her in his lap in the front seat and making her come in a dark parking lot, because his boyfriend never stops talking and can’t, apparently, have a single fantasy without sharing it.) Even stranger that he doesn’t really notice much beyond the hum of the radio and the way her hands curl around the gear shaft, careful eyes darting back and forth on the short drive to her place. 

_ I’ll pick you up in an hour and a half _ , Obito texts him.  _ Ironing something out with Madara. _ He stares at the phone dumbly, the blinking dots that indicate Obito is typing. 

_ She called me honey _ , he texts back, the endearment still reverberating through his bones. 

_ You’re probably dying _ , his boyfriend offers helpfully, before the dots go away and Kakashi’s phone goes dark, idling in his hand. 

In the house, Rin guides him past the kitchen, the living room where he and Obito have waited for her and snooped through her things many times already, to the dark hallway he knows leads to her bedroom. 

“I like your couch, too,” he says, not wanting to impose on her more than he already has. A little afraid, perhaps, of what his reaction will be to her caring for him like this. Obito will be here soon. He’s sat up with Kakashi for concussions before, keeping him awake with soft kisses and elaborate stories and tv shows that Kakashi hardly remembers in the morning. 

“That’s nice, Kakashi,” she drags him through the doorway anyway, turning on the bedside lamp and leading him directly to her neatly made bed. Mother of fuck, it’s impossible not to think about her on that mattress, spread out for them. He wonders what her hair looks like against the soft lavender of her sheets, whether she bites her pillows at night to stop herself from making too much noise, whether her duvet smells like her. It feels easy, right, simple to let her put him to bed there, a warm hand on his forehead and slightly worried eyes gazing directly into his. Her eyelashes are long, so long, the curve of her cheek an impossible span he could imagine putting his mouth on a thousand times. If Obito was here, he would know what to say, Kakashi is sure of it. 

“You’re so pretty,” he whispers, despite himself, quiet enough that he’s not even sure he really said it- wouldn’t know if he did, except her cheeks go pink and she looks away from him quickly, pulling back. 

“I’m going to get you water that you’re going to drink, and ibuprofen you’re going to take, and then we can watch something while we wait for Obito to come get you, okay?” she asks, waiting for his nod of assent before she turns and pads away back down the hallway, back towards the kitchen. Her bedroom is cute, somehow exactly the way he’d imagined it and yet nothing like that at all. A few botanical prints line the walls, various poisonous plants and their medicinal uses, and another crammed bookshelf identical to the two in her living room is shoved up against her dresser. Her curtains have constellations on them, blocking out even the faint light of the lilac dusk, the setting sun, the universe outside these walls. He drifts a little, until she’s back and shaking his shoulder, coaxing him to sit up and pulling a fleece blanket over his lap. “Here,” she offers him the glass. He drinks it dutifully, unwilling to disappoint, swallows the pills easily for her, sunk under the weight of her caring. 

By the time Obito arrives to take Kakashi home, thanking Rin with a hug that startles a very endearing squeak out of her and writing down all of her recommendations, he is certain that he’s in trouble. 

* * *

He tests it out (when does he not test things out? It’s one of the more infuriating things about him, if Obito is to be believed- he pushes boundaries and tests limits and fiddles with things and takes almost too long to make decisions, every time) when Obito is away again. 

“You’ll go for your appointment, yes?” Obito asks him, fussing over him like Mito baa-chan and tucking his scarf in, fiddling with his mask where it hangs loose around his chin. “Concussions are no joke, Baka-shi.” Kakashi rolls his eyes, secretly loving the way Obito’s hands flutter over him and the way he looms ever so slightly. The weight of him here, his presence, his insistence that Kakashi is important to him, never gets old. 

“ _ Yes _ ,” Kakashi says, tugging Obito in closer so he can fit their mouths together, drag his canines over Obito’s lower lip and relish in the shudder it engenders. Obito melts into him easily, every bit the boy Kakashi fell in love with years ago, wrapping his arms around Kakashi’s waist and slotting them together in such a satisfying way. “I can’t lose these precious brain cells, you know, or between the two of us we’ll be absolutely fucked.” 

He sits obediently during his appointment and lets Rin check his eyes again, answers her questions, and thinks about her sitting between him and Obito on the deck of one of Madara’s vacation properties. And it aches a little in his chest, in a very familiar way he hasn’t experienced since he was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, stupid enamored with his beautiful best friend. 

Kakashi remembers what it was like to love Obito, when they were in highschool. At that point, Kakashi was living with Minato, who encouraged Kakashi to bring home friends as much as possible, even with a newborn sleeping baby in the house- despite the fact that Kakashi never really wanted Gai disturbing the peace, and he only allowed himself so much vulnerability with Asuma, or Genma, or Raidou. But Obito was different. Kakashi had never explicitly invited him over: he had appeared on the doorstep, less than twenty four hours after the formation of their fragile detente in middle school when Kakashi had stepped into a fight on Obito’s behalf, and Obito had promptly proceeded to worm his way into every facet of Kakashi’s life. Sometimes, he thinks that Obito reached his hand right into Kakashi’s chest and grabbed his heart that day with grinning teeth, never to give it back. 

He had, for a time, entertained the thought that his love was unrequited. In that silly way of adolescents, insecure and doubtful of their own worth, he pined- cut through the heart every time Obito spoke about how handsome Genma was, or how beautiful he found Anko. Oh, Anko would have been perfect. After all, Orochimaru adored his adopted daughter, and a relationship between them could have cemented even more familial ties than Kakashi’s friendship with Obito had. How could Obito want  _ him _ ? Looking in the mirror each morning and seeing the face of his father before he put on his mask, peering at the long lanky lines of his body and thinking about how much broader Obito’s shoulders were, how handsome the angle of his jaw had become. After school, they would lay together on his giant bed (Kushina had insisted on it, claimed it made the room more ‘homey’) and listened to music, sharing earbuds connected to Obito’s phone. The place Kakashi’s arm touched his was always the burning line between continental plates, magma pushing up hot and hissing into the ocean waters. And he would think- what would it be like, to roll over and kiss Obito across his scarred cheek- to breathe him in and bite his tongue and feel their bodies tight together. 

It was awful, horrible, stupid to feel such lust for the adrenaline of Obito’s laughter in his ear, when they stole Madara’s motorcycle and took it on a joyride. When he would toss Naruto up in the air and let the giggling follow Kakashi’s baby brother all the way down back into his arms, or let Sasuke and an eleven year old Itachi sleep draped over his lap while they studied at Mikoto’s when Madara was out of town. When he would drag Kakashi out to look at the stars in the park and push close in against him to ward off the cold of the night. When he passed notes in class, or coerced him into ditching school to go get slushies at the gas station, eating candy until they were sick in the back of Kakashi’s truck. The words he spoke branded themselves across Kakashi’s skin like the searing heat of a rogue sun-  _ I’d die for you, Kakashi, I’d kill for you.  _

“Your kid is heartsick,” he heard Jiraiya murmuring to Minato one night, before he crept upstairs past Naruto’s room in order to avoid anyone seeing him sneak in after curfew. He didn’t want to know what Minato would say back- bitter about it, like Kakashi didn’t watch Minato doing the same thing ten years ago, when he was seventeen and enamored with Kushina. Even Obito’s uncle Madara notices, uncharacteristically kind to Kakashi one night when he and Obito are hanging around a bar they shouldn’t even be able to get into, still four years too young to be drinking the spiked ginger ale Izuna slipped them under the counter. 

“I’m never one to advocate emotional transparency,” Madara told him, a dignified greying gaze over the rim of a martini glass. “As you know, Hatake. But you might do well to occasionally consider going after what you want. Consider getting out of this bar, too, before Namikaze comes looking for you.” Kakashi considers, instead, spitting something about what a hypocrite Madara is, taking into account all these years he’s pined uselessly over Hashirama, but he wants to keep his knees bullet-hole free so he keeps his mouth shut. The thrill, though, the thrill of running under sodium street-lamps with Obito that night, turned golden by their flickering pools, turned immortal in the chilling air. He passed the math test they had the next morning, even on three hours of sleep, and what was it about Obito that made him want to scream reckless and free in a deserted intersection uptown at eleven pm? Gai tells him it’s the beauty of youth, young love sunk deep in the river, irrigating the fields until they overflow with summer peonies and winter wheat. 

Maybe it is. 

In March of senior year, a girl from their homeroom asks Obito to go on a date with her. 

“No offense,” he says, leaning casually into Kakashi’s side on the bench where they’re eating lunch. “Thanks, really- you’re beautiful- but I’m a little busy, you know?” His smile seems to daze her enough that she doesn’t get too put out, scurrying away with a red face and slumped shoulders, and Obito laughs into his neck afterwards-  _ what, I can’t go out with that girl this weekend, Kakashi, you said we were going to see the new Mission Impossible, right? _ Kakashi’s entire chest feels like it’s caving in, imagining asking Obito what he’s wanted to for months, for years probably, and having it wash off Obito like water off a duck’s back just the way that girl’s offer had, so smoothly and so, so cruelly. 

“ _ Hey, hey, hey, _ ” he remembers, Obito’s breath washing across his face in the dark of the movie theater, his teenage hormones abruptly going wild at the smell of watermelon gum and popcorn. “ _ You think Kagami would teach us to climb buildings like that? We could do parkour together, wouldn’t that be amazing _ ?” 

At night, his bed was an ocean, pulling him down to the depths of dark trenches with the smell of the sweatshirt Obito left behind thrown over his face and his boxers uncomfortably tight. Probably gross, definitely shameful, the way Obito’s damn spicy, expensive cologne (courtesy of Madara, who insisted that all Uchiha should have a signature scent, like  _ gentlemen _ ) made his head swim. Jiraiya asked him weeks ago if Kakashi wanted him to put in a good word with Konan or Nagato, even Yahiko-  _ get the kid out of your head, Kakashi, at least give yourself some space to work things out _ \- but the thought of giving that time to anyone else made him sick. He thought about how broad Obito would be over him, gentle smile and rough teeth, how his thigh would feel between Kakashi’s. And it’s not like he’s a stranger to sex, not with access to the internet and Jiraiya or Madara around, but he’s never had such vivid dreams before. In his sleep, Obito’s fingers wrap around his throat, kissing him softly as he loses all the air in his lungs to his lover’s careful hands. His traitorous brain imagines every way that Obito might bite him, mark him, rip him open and carefully put him back together. He wakes up shaking more than once, come in his boxers and an ache in his stomach, wrecked by the lurid aftershocks of the way his dream-Obito bent him down over the mattress and made him  _ beg _ . 

“It would be easier if you’d just ask him out,” Kushina hands him the butter over the breakfast table one morning, matter of fact and pulling no punches, as per usual. She spoons cream of wheat cereal into Naruto’s bowl at the same time as she wipes a smudge off Kakashi’s jaw, and he marvels at her for a moment. Her hand is soft on his cheek before he pulls away, turning pink, even as Minato hisses censure at her over the sound of the baby’s babble. But he can’t, can he, not when the possibility of rejection hangs in the balance. It’s weird, feeling this tender part of him so exposed in the daylight. He thinks of himself as jagged edges, broken glass balled together with tar, far too dangerous to ever get close to. He likes to imagine he has no weaknesses, save Obito, who plasters himself across Kakashi’s sleeve like a badge of honor, a brand on his heart. Oh, he remembers so vividly what it was like to want for Obito in those days, sore and aching, a plum bruise across his sternum that never seemed to heal. In a way, there is a sense of sweet nostalgia in feeling that bruise again when he looks at Rin. Would that they could solve it the way he and Obito did, back then-

“What is  _ wrong _ with you lately,” Obito had growled, shoving Kakashi into the door of his room at Madara’s house, plastered with posters his cousins handed down. 

“A lot,” Kakashi said nonchalantly, like his heart wasn’t beating out of his chest, like there wasn’t a rushing river in his ears and a swelling storm in his stomach. As though Obito wasn’t holding him up against the wall in the ringing silence of the empty house, face inches away, legs pressed to him, glued to him in the quagmire of tension that rippled through the room. He lived an entire life in the moments their grey eyes met each other, imagining the world in which he got on his knees and begged Obito to stay with him forever. Bracing himself for the world in which this is the last time Obito puts his hands on Kakashi so sweetly because how is he going to look at him when he knows? Obito’s one eye can see more than Kakashi ever could, searching him for answers that Kakashi doesn’t want to give, searching him for the source of the sickness that twists in his bones, a poisonous plant leaving him anchorless on the tide of Obito’s storm. 

“You idiot,” Obito muttered, voice aching, before he pressed his mouth to Kakashi’s more smoothly than he’s ever done anything, like this is the one thing he can possibly get right on the first try. And they fit- oh, god, they  _ fit _ together, nothing Kakashi’s ever felt before, overwhelmed with the sensation of falling into a million pieces in his arms until Kakashi’s crying and Obito’s gentle thumbs are wiping away his tears. He holds Kakashi’s face like Kakashi is precious to him, dragging his mask all the way off his neck and pushing his face into the other boy’s throat as he shakes apart. “You love me,” Obito said, so surely, and it was all Kakashi could do to nod helplessly, face red and eyes swollen as it all comes out, a flood through the levy drowning him alive. “Good,” he pushed his forehead against Kakashi, nose to nose, breath shared, an infinity between them. “Good, good, good,  _ god _ , I love you so much, you have no  _ idea- _ ” and then Kakashi was laughing, reckless and bright and so fucking in love with him that it hurt just to exist. 

They fell asleep in Obito’s bed, later that afternoon, tear-stained and tired, joyfully slumbering under the glow-in-the-dark stars they’d stuck to his ceiling in seventh grade. 

Here, in the present, Kakashi lies awake with Obito curled against him like a mirror, a furnace under the covers even in the late winter cold. It’s bittersweet, to know that his heart has room to ache after someone like it did (does) for Obito- another someone. Behind his eyes, he can see the way Rin’s arms would wrap around Obito’s waist, the softness of her stomach under his hands. He knows how Obito’s silver scars would look against her tan skin, how Kakashi’s pale leg could fit between her thick thighs, how their mouths could match perfectly with hers. An entire universe of could-be, split in three, a kaleidoscope of things too good for men like them to grasp. 

“I want her underneath me,” Obito whispers into his shoulder, melted into the shadows of their room. “On top of you, between us-” Kakashi turns them, pushing Obito into the mattress and kissing him quiet, as quiet as he ever is, before he can lose his mind entirely. His fingernails drag down Obito’s ribcage, dragging shivers from him, and the weight of his erection in Kakashi’s mouth is nothing short of perfect. Obito arches, gasps, wraps indelicate fingers in Kakashi’s hair, pleading for him to give themselves a chance at happiness with every squirm of his hips. He knows that, in the end, he’ll give in. 

“Why are you always so  _ brave _ ,” Kakashi murmurs, biting a garden of purple irises into Obito’s hip bones, letting him jerk and writhe for more. “How are you always so much braver than I am-” His lover cries into the pillows, mouth open and beautiful, wet and shameless below him. 

“You could love her, couldn’t you,” Obito breathes, the indictment of him hanging heavy between them when Kakashi wraps fingers around Obito’s cock and thinks of doing this while Rin’s eyes rest upon them like a hurricane. There’s a sob caught in his chest, truth painful and thick moving through veins that protest it, the concept of fitting another person in there and opening himself up to even more hurt. It’s glorious, the way Obito takes his hand back, laces their fingers together and turns him over until he can sit on Kakashi’s legs like he belongs there and kiss the life back into him. He presses his boy into the mattress, loves him slowly until they shatter and breathe together once again. 

“I could,” Kakashi says, so softly Obito can barely hear it. 

“Trust me,” Obito holds him closer, tighter, bare atoms separating them until they are one person spinning in the center of the universe. “I know.” 

* * *

“The problem is, I can’t imagine her doing this,” Obito murmurs a few hours later, as he wipes the edge of his knife off and collapses it again, sliding it in his back pocket. Kakashi hums in assent behind him, mechanical clicking as he reloads his gun and kicks at the bloodied leg of the closest Kumo, rolling his shoulders and huffing out a long, steady breath. 

“She’s no stranger to blood,” Kakashi offers, after they’ve confirmed that every single one of the men who’d tried to ambush them is without a pulse. The docks are frigid this time of year, winter winds blowing through shuddering streetlamps and rotted wood groaning with the weight of the tide. This close to the ocean, the bloody smell is almost in tune with the salt and seaweed and tanker exhaust. “She doesn’t need to know how to do  _ this _ ,” he gestures expansively, at the cold moon, at the sodium lamps and the stars and the windows of the empty warehouses, blank as judges looking down on them, “to be around us.” 

“Yeah,” Obito says, nudging his shoulder and laughing under his breath as they make their way back towards the car. This deal was obviously a wreck, their shipping contact gone out of his way to fuck them over hard. Minato was going to be pissed. “It’s better if spouses don’t work in the same field anyway, right?” 

“Get fucked,” Kakashi snorted, shoving him right back and yanking his keys out of his hand, climbing in the driver’s seat. “I guarantee you that if Rin doesn’t wanna be around us, she’ll let you know. Do you genuinely think she’d work around Jiraiya if she didn’t have the balls to do that much?” He shrugs, rolling his neck a little as they pull away, silent in the night under the cover of the coming storm. “Ugh. Stop making me be the emotionally intelligent one, I feel itchy now.” 


	3. March, April

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rin realizes she's in too deep to back out now, Obito is a bit of a little shit, and Kakashi gets his competence kink absolutely slammed. Also, poker is played.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's been so so nice and commented such absolutely gracious and kind things!! I have almost all of this fic written (about 46k) and I'm just posting chapters as I have time to edit them and get them fixed up. I'm very glad that people have been enjoying this so far!! This chapter is fairly lighthearted but next chapter is when things get a little more real :)

The problem with Rin trying to keep her distance from Kakashi and Obito is that it’s only easy to remain in the friendly mindset she takes when dealing with Senju associates, albeit ones she knows a lot better than most, when they’re seeing her exclusively at her office or at her home. But the longer she knows them, the closer they seem to get, worming their way in between her ribs until they make a home in her stomach, a twisting weight that never seems to go away. They have no sense of personal space, no need to abide by normal human working hours, and zero interest, it appears, in leaving her alone. One part eye-candy, three parts fr0ustration, approximately two parts good conversation about literature (solely from Kakashi and a few dashes of the shitty jokes Obito tells plus the way they sometimes bring her food that mysteriously always matches her regular order from whatever place they stopped on their way to her house. One day, she sits down to put on her shoes for work and idly thinks about the fact that Obito had expressed a fondness for the patterned compression socks she wears on long shifts last week- and at that point, Rin has to admit that they know her a lot better than she’d ever meant to let them. She can remember Kakashi telling her about Obito’s favorite food (dango) and how he hates most kinds of soup. Yesterday, she came home to Obito watering her house plants and bitching about how she doesn’t wash the dust off their leaves often enough. (She didn’t even know you had to  _ do  _ that, because she can bring a man back from the brink of death but she’s not exactly a miracle worker when it comes to her leafy roommates.)

A part of her wonders what her other mentors from med school would have said about this unconventional arrangement. There are always rules about fraternization, inappropriate relationships, ethical concerns… the list goes on and on. She knows that were she working in Konoha General and also spending this much time with her patients there, she would theoretically be signing dual-relationship contracts left and right to cover her ass for liability reasons. Or maybe she wouldn’t, in the end, because Konoha General is part of Konoha-at-large, and while Rin only saw the ways the Senju exerted control in the hospital through Tsunade, she’s certain that brand of rot must run much deeper. The hospital is but a microcosm of the corruption in the city overall, tangled up in the web that the police department runs, deep into the root of the tree sprouting directly from the mayor’s office. Obito and Kakashi know the corruption of the city better than most, she supposes, because they’re an integral part of it, as the sons of the largest criminal families in Konoha. And, from the rumors she’s heard about Kakashi’s father (a good cop sold out by a rotted through department, killed in the line of duty by friendly fire, put in the ground disgraced and cold, leaving his grieving orphan son behind) he certainly knows the poison of Konoha as well as anyone. It would follow, then, that they don’t particularly care to abide by the common sense rules she was taught in her medical ethics course. It should worry her, possibly more so than it does currently, but... She already works for the Senju. 

If she were going to play by the rules, she probably would have moved back to her grandfather’s house and worked in the local clinic and found a boring hometown boy or girl to marry when she finally got her own office. If Rin were going to live a predictable life, she wouldn’t have chosen Tsunade as her mentor, and she wouldn’t have accepted Jiraiya’s help in college, and she certainly wouldn’t have gotten a job at the Senju clinic. She would have run away the first time Hashirama “coincidentally” ran into her at the grocery store and asked her about fifteen invasive questions about her life while still managing to sound friendly about it all. If Rin were ordinary, she would be living an ordinary life, but the fact of the matter is that she’s  _ not  _ ordinary, not anymore. The company she kept put that idea out of the running entirely, and everyone around her seemed disinclined to ever let her sway back towards the path of normalcy again. 

In early March, Minato had come by the clinic to drop something off for Jiraiya through Tsunade, with his bubbling bright golden son bouncing along behind him. This man, the one Kakashi and Obito so feared (loved, respected, adored) and called Sensei with utter fondness on their tongues, had the kindest blue eyes she’d ever seen. 

“Say good afternoon to the extraordinary Dr. Nohara,” he told Naruto, leaning against the doorway of her office and smiling at her, captured sunlight blinding bright even as his son bounced forward and put his hands on eighteen different toys in her bookcase. He utterly ignored his father, engrossed entirely in touching as many things in as little time as possible, and Minato just laughed, clear and bright as bells. 

“Hello, Naruto,” Rin managed to hold in a giggle, leaning down to meet his eyes and watching him fiddle with the legos she specifically kept on the lower shelves. “How are you and your father today?”

“You’re not going to poke me this time, right,” Naruto said suspiciously, narrowing his little eyes at her the same way he had several weeks ago, when Kushina brought him in for his shots. When Rin shook her head, his face brightened considerably. “Then we’re doing good! Papa said I can have ice cream if I don’t tell Mama, which means you also can’t tell Mama, because Mama gets mad when we have ice cream before dinner, even if it’s after lunch-”

“That’s quite enough secret-telling, little man,” Minato said smoothly, his voice still tinged with laughter as he reached out to ruffle Naruto’s mussed straw head and pulled him back a little bit. “I simply wanted to check in and see how you were doing, Doctor. I know my other sons can be a little bit of a handful.” _My other sons are very important to_ _me_ went without saying. _I would kill for my other sons, my beautiful boys, my beloved ones_. She recalls Obito, sitting on her porch and swearing he was only going to smoke one cigarette, waiting for Kakashi to come get him. _Minato was there for Kakashi when this city was ready to bury him and his father at the same time_ , he’d said, blowing smoke and fog from his mouth like a caged dragon. _And he always looked after me just the same, too, when Uncle Madara took me in and I met Kakashi_. 

“Obito is surprisingly good at following my medical instructions,” she said, gently turning the puzzle toy in Naruto’s hand until it was right side up. Minato’s eyes (those unfathomably kind eyes) are briefly steel on the side of her face, cutting cold across her cheekbone. Unlike Jiraiya, who has been serious around her but never overtly frightening, Minato has the ability to vacillate between friendly and deadly in a fraction of a second. It’s almost as though that deadliness has concentrated itself down through the metaphorical generations of Senju she’s met. Cheerful Hashirama, the gallant Jiraiya, this mercurial man in front of her, down to the sharpness of Kakashi backlit by her kitchen light, bleeding on the carpet she got from the thrift store when she moved to the city. Rin has never been able to conceive of Jiraiya as a man who might kill someone, but the keen nature of Minato’s appraising gaze makes her believe that  _ he  _ would. Having met Kushina, a veritable hurricane of a woman, Rin can believe the both of them would burn the world down for the people that they love. 

“Surprising indeed,” Minato turned towards the window, looking over her framed diplomas and a watercolor she’d inherited from her mother, hanging relics of a woman who could not have possibly thought her daughter would end up here. “And Kakashi?”

“Your son is brilliant,” Rin told him, even as Naruto crowed in victory, clicking the pieces of the puzzle together with fumbling, stubby fingers. When Minato met her gaze, she knew that he understood her well, that she wasn’t talking about the blonde boy standing between them in her office- but the silver haired man who saw everything in brilliant detail, slouching to avoid the responsibility of his own intellect, incapable of shutting his mind down. 

“He is, isn’t he,” Minato said, rather wonderingly, coaxing Naruto to put the puzzle back in its place on Rin’s bookshelf. “He doesn’t always make the smartest choices, though,” Minato looked at her over his shoulder as he turned Naruto towards the door. “I trust you would know better than to let him walk on a fault line, Doctor.” She shivered briefly, grasping the pen in her white coat pocket and squaring her shoulders, because she was not a stranger to tests and, indeed, what student of Tsunade would be willing to fail such an obvious one?

“Just Rin is fine, Mr. Namikaze,” she smiled at him the same way she always had before entering an operating room, scalpels between her teeth. “Thank you for trusting me with your family.” And then he smiled again, the way he had when he arrived, sun dawning over ocean waves and blinding the boats on the horizon. 

The whole encounter had been unsettling in some ways and convicting in others, inescapable the same way Kakashi and Obito’s friendship seemed to be, leaving her with the knowledge that there was truly no way to extricate herself from their family’s tangled web. It helped, of course, that it had also been a while since she gave herself the space to make new friends. No wonder, really, with her workaholic tendencies and the way med school had left her with a crushing lack of emotional energy to devote to learning new people for a good long while. Shizune and Kurenai and occasionally Anko are really all she has the bandwidth for, most of the time. And then there was the gently pressing matter of her utter lack of love life to contend with, as well. Her new shadows aren’t exactly people she wants as  _ just  _ friends- Kakashi and Obito are frequent visitors in her dreams, a little too distractingly handsome and difficult to stop thinking about. Despite the rather obscene dreams she determinedly represses like clockwork most mornings, though, their friendship, however it comes to be right now, is undeniably welcome. At this point, they’ve been through everything in her house, have shown up at every hour of the day, and don’t show any signs of stopping- so when she picks up Obito’s phone call one Friday afternoon late in March, she hardly thinks anything of it. 

“Good afternoon, my dear doctor,” Obito practically sings over the crackling cell line connection. Rin is immediately suspicious. “What’re you up to?”

“Obito,” she acknowledges, an unbidden smile spreading across her face even as she props the phone between her shoulder and her ear, sorting through her cabinet looking for the can of soup she swears she saw last week. She has a rare three-day weekend with the clinic closed down for a bank holiday observance, and she’s come down with a severe craving for tomato soup and grilled cheese while watching her backed up list of old television shows. “The clinic is closed today, as you well know. Do you two need something?” In the background, she can faintly hear Kakashi humming along to the car radio, interjecting a word or two under his breath as he navigates their car somewhere. In the back of her mind, there’s a little voice hoping that they do, in fact, need something. It’s been a week since she last saw them, and, loath as she is to admit it, she’s missing them a little bit. That  _ friendship  _ she’d been musing about sits heavy on her tongue as she waits for Obito’s response. 

“How, uh,” he asks, the music abruptly turning down. Kakashi whines about it, tinny through the line, before the sound expands as Obito puts her on speakerphone. “How good are you at poker?” He’s a little bit muffled, echoing around the cab of what’s probably Kakashi’s beat up truck that perpetually looks like he’s just taken the dogs out mudding.

“Better than Tsunade,” Rin says without thinking, cringing a little to imagine her boss finding out she’d admitted that. “I mean, I know my way around a table. What, did you manage to sustain a crippling card related injury this time? I can’t help you with wounds of the ego, you know.” Kakashi whistles, high and amused, as Obito whines low and long like she’s stabbed him directly in the heart. 

“I can’t believe there’s  _ two _ of you,” he groans, very put upon indeed. “No fuckin’ respect, I swear to god.” There’s a sound of shifting gears and an abrupt stop to the humming wind in the background. 

“He’s asking because we need a player tonight,” Kakashi says, much closer to the speaker. It sends a little shiver down her spine, like he’s right here talking directly into her ear, and she can almost feel the way his breath would warm her neck. “And since you’re free, you’re coming with us.” 

“We’d  _ like _ you to come with us,” Obito amends hastily, like he’s worried she doesn’t already know Kakashi is somewhat of an overbearing asshole. She stares at the can of soup she’s finally found, and the loaf of sourdough bread, and then down at the sweatpants she’s still wearing from her post-gym shower this morning. This is a step farther than treating Obito’s broken knuckles, or Kakashi’s bruised jaw, or that nasty through and through he’d gotten last month. If she’s been on a boat all this time, watching the shore from her couch while Kakashi shows up with offerings of coffee and Obito usurps her HBO subscription, this is the wind that sweeps her fully out to sea. More so than eating a lunch of sandwiches they brought her while she checks on Obito’s bad eye, more so than staying up all night in the big exam room to give Kakashi fluids, more so than getting a personal phone call from Minato thanking her for keeping “his boys” alive. She is too far from land, now, to go back, and furthermore- she isn’t entirely sure she wants to.  _ Tsunade’s been fucking Jiraiya this whole time _ , she thinks.  _ I can go play poker for a night. _

“Do I have to dress up?” Because she doesn’t really have anything that isn’t ‘modest church wedding’ or ‘boring secretary’ that’s nicer than this. It’s a little sad, maybe, that she’s twenty four and the only time she goes out is when Shizune and Kurenai drag her to brunch, or Tsunade calls an office happy hour. 

“I’ve got it covered,” Kakashi says smoothly, before they hang up. She stares at her phone for a second, certain the call had dropped- because god, they aren’t in need of  _ that _ much domestication, are they- before her doorbell rings and she drops the can of soup on her foot in surprise. 

“Awfully sure of yourselves,” she says, rather grumpily, when she opens the door with her smarting toes already turning red to find them standing there with a duffle bag in hand. “You startled me.” 

“Aww,” Obito coos obnoxiously, chucking her under the chin gently as he sweeps past her into the house. She lashes her elbow back at him, catching him neatly in the kidney when he passes her and relishing in the echoing sound of Obito’s yelp in her kitchen, the grin Kakashi gives her under the mask, the easy way he melts into her entryway. 

“I’m pretty sure I know your size,” Kakashi says, following her as she returns to the kitchen, where Obito has made himself comfortable at the table with a can of beer that was lurking in her fridge, a brand she never buys and is certain only appeared after they’d started coming around. The duffle bag thuds to the floor, a sudden prickle on the back of her neck her only warning before Kakashi’s hands slide around her waist, fingers pressing in like he could span the entire circumference without a sweat. She yelps, a truly embarrassing, high pitched sound, before he squeezes once (and fuck, god, what  _ is  _ it about that- the sense that he could just pick her up and move her, the feeling of being so small under his hands-) and hums. “Yep, I definitely picked the right one.” The right size, the right clothes, the right woman. He lets go, turning to the duffle bag and unzipping it, starting to pull out clothing- women’s clothing- and compare the ways the colors look together. Rin just stands there for a moment, staring resolutely at the middle distance past Obito’s shoulder in order to ignore the way he’s looking at her like he might eat her alive, and the way her cheeks are definitely blooming red. 

She puts on the clothes without looking in the mirror, unable to reconcile the tight skirt and sheer glittering gray leggings and rather daring neckline. It’s not what she would have chosen for herself. That’s a good thing, though, because while Rin can be brave and she’s no slouch at playing pretend for men (which she assumes will be the focus of the evening) having someone push her a little out of her comfort zone is the only way she’ll ever expand it. She’s always been that way, rising to meet any occasion. When Rin emerges from her room, as sparkly and made up as she can reasonably be while still feeling like herself, she tries to avoid their eyes out of self preservation. They tell her the same thing the mirror was trying to, slivers of words about the way her thighs look with sheer gray glitter stretched across them, and how she had to dig out a bra that was a little less full-coverage in order to meet the demands of the plunging neckline. 

There’s a little seed of guilt that grows in her belly when she catches Kakashi looking her up and down, appraisal heavy in his gaze, because he is Obito’s and Obito is his, and she is no one’s at all. She shouldn’t want his hands back on her waist so badly, or to feel the way he nearly picked her up again, or to follow a dangerous path down to the river where he might lift her gently and place her on the countertop and kiss her senseless with clever fingers making promises between her thighs. She cannot accept the offer Obito’s smug expression makes, or consider letting him loom over her and get his warm hands up her skirt. When they usher her out the door and down the walkway towards the car, she takes the back of the car instead of the proffered passenger seat, because seeing the two of them sitting side by side in the front is the only thing that can remind her they are two islands grown together through a decade of volcanic passions and she is a separate atoll drifting cold on the ocean waves. 

(Just as it’s been ages since Rin made new friends, it’s been quite a while since she felt this kind of unmitigated desire for someone(s), to a point where the tension between them is a deep sea of magma simmering, threatening, bubbling up even while everyone is still fully clothed and perfectly platonic.)

“What kind of poker night is this?” she asks, when they pull out of the parking lot and she’s confident in her voice again. 

“Just a friendly game,” Kakashi says, glancing at her in the rearview mirror, as Obito twists in his seat to grin at her again. He does that a lot, enough so that she’s getting used to deciphering what each of his smiles mean. This one is meant to be reassuring, although it’s a little too close to the edge of feral to be fully effective. She notices, abruptly, that he’s got a hint of eyeliner at the corners of his visible eye, smudged out just slightly and strangely appealing. 

“We’re only playing for money, not business,” he scrunches his nose and tilts his head at her like a curious crow. “And we’ve got your buy in already, don’t worry about it. Someone else would have been playing your seat so Hashirama and Madara sent us with money for a third. Just, ah, don’t be too intimidated by the other players, yeah? They’re really quite harmless, I swear.” 

“They’re not  _ harmless _ ,” Kakashi corrects coolly, eyes back on the road. “But they won’t hurt  _ you _ .” 

“They’re Akatsuki,” Obito turns back around, tapping out an easy rhythm on the dashboard with his scarred hand. “They’ll like you, though. We play with them once a month, just a night without much pressure. It’s good for our…  _ relationship  _ with them.” Ah. So it’s the type of business that requires frequent shows of good faith, then. 

The bar itself is mostly unremarkable, aside from the fact that Obito had to show he had his gun to get in instead of just checking it at the door. Everyone here seems like they could kill her in about five seconds flat. It’s clearly an Akatsuki establishment, from the red cloud on the front and the hanging wall of traditional hats. She doesn’t know much about them, other than that they’re a little more international than familial, compared to the Senju or the Uchiha, or one of the neighboring city gangs like Kumo and Kiri. It would be scarier if she hadn’t gotten so much more used to that sort of thing in the past six months than she’d like to think about (or if Obito’s hand wasn’t hot on her lower back, guiding her through the chairs and tables.) And, unlike most of the bars that she’s been in, no one cat-calls her as they walk up to the bar, which is a huge bonus. Behind the bar, a single man with red hair polishes glasses, listening stone-faced to a loud blonde man who gesticulates wildly but doesn’t seem to be saying anything coherent. The closer they get to the counter, the clearer the shapes dangling among the hanging bar lights become. There are smooth wooden puppets hanging by their strings from the ceilings, watching the patrons of the bar with soulless eyes. If Rin were more superstitious, or easily scared, she’d probably be pretty creeped out by them. 

Neither Kakashi nor Obito seem to give the puppets a second glance; Obito starts speaking with the bartender immediately, easily, and the bartender’s eyes show just a brief flicker of positive emotion when he offers them drinks (Obito insists on paying) and points them towards a booth at the back. Obito introduces her with possession evident in his tone, says he’ll get her ‘something surprising’, and Sasori (he gives her his name in a tone so blank she can barely make out the friendliness behind it) smiles at her with more warmth than she expected as Kakashi leads her back away towards the designated booth. 

“He seems nice,” Rin says, leaning against Kakashi’s shoulder on the bench seat, watching Obito talk to Sasori over the gleaming, polished counter while the shorter man fixes their drinks. Kakashi snorts audibly, shifting until he can put his arm over the back of the booth, which tips her a little further into his side in a way that wouldn’t be so distracting if he wasn’t so warm and didn’t smell so much like Obito’s cologne. The bar isn’t so much different from places she used to work in college, and for a minute she can almost pretend they’re on a date, foolish and young. Which they aren’t, because Kakashi’s boyfriend is ten yards away from them. “And polite, unlike  _ some  _ people,” Rin manages to laugh as she pointedly rolls her head towards Obito, shaking the thoughts from her head. 

“He kills people,” Kakashi points out mildly, like he doesn’t also likely do that, like he isn’t melting her a little with his proximity and the heat radiating off him through his thin cotton shirt. Like she would be here if that was, theoretically, a dealbreaker for her. “And frequently makes terrifying little puppets. You see all the puppets, Rin?” 

“Everyone has a creative outlet,” she shrugs, fighting a smile when he glares at her. They’re hidden in the booth behind stained glass and old stained wooden dividers, so he’s pulled his mask down under his chin. It gives her the opportunity to see the fullness of his expressions, probably half the reason he wears the mask in the first place. His pouting mouth, excessively pink and slick for  _ no good reason _ and the smooth line of his jaw- she doesn’t stare, but it’s a near thing. From the hallway behind their booth, heels alert her to someone making their way towards them, a brief respite from her continued torment at the hands of these ridiculously good looking men. Before the intruder even makes it to their table, Kakashi’s mask is back up, and so is his guard. 

“Who’s this, Hatake? You finally get tired of Obito?” a low, sweet voice drawls, its lilac-haired owner sliding into the booth across from them and resting her chin on her fist. She’s probably a good six inches taller than Rin, a pretty doll-face and a messy bun and paper crane earrings hanging from her pale ears. Kakashi stiffens almost imperceptibly, pulling Rin closer to him and slipping his hand down across her shoulder, even as he laughs easy through his mask. 

“You don’t get tired of Uchihas, Konan,” Kakashi drawls, free hand curling tight around his drink, condensation dripping down and making a ring on the wood below. “Tenzo couldn’t come tonight, so Rin kindly offered to take his place.”

“I’m sure she  _ offered _ ,” Konan says, looking him up and down with some innuendo that’s lost to Rin’s ears but clearly makes it to Kakashi’s, the little ripple of tension obvious between them. “Hatake’s a shit date,” she purrs, turning her wide, pouting smile directly on Rin. It makes her feel, for a moment, as though the sun is still shining outside, right through the dingy windows, blinking stars from her eyes with how shiny and straight Konan’s teeth are. “Can I buy you a drink, sweet thing?” She’s starting to think that maybe every person Kakashi and Obito interact with is just deadly attractive, feeling the flutter of butterflies crawling up her throat, when Obito shoves more drinks down towards Kakashi with a clatter of clinking glasses and slides in beside her. The force of his entrance only pushes her closer to Kakashi, who doesn’t seem to mind at all, and Obito’s hand rests hot and easy on her knee under the table.

“Isn’t Nagato waiting somewhere for you to peg him?” Obito asks, wiggling his eyebrows at the other woman as he rubs a thumb slow and firm across Rin’s thigh. It makes her breath stutter just a little bit, thick in her chest at the possessive weight, and the way his expression is joking but his voice is definitely not. Konan just laughs, though, leaning back and eyeing the three of them with an appraising gaze. 

“Probably,” she shrugs, watching Obito pass Rin the drink she hadn’t asked for, which is somehow coincidentally exactly what she would have ordered if Obito had let her go to the bar herself. Rin has to wonder how they know so much about her. She’s not naive enough to believe it’s just luck, how they keep picking her favorite things and proving to her that somehow they’ve gotten to  _ know _ her whether she’s let them or not. “Not that he or Yahiko would begrudge me shooting my shot, hmm? It’s not often we get someone  _ genuinely _ beautiful around here,” and Konan leers again, slow eyes dragging up and down the skin between Rin’s soft throat and the swell of her breasts, more exposed by these clothes than she’s used to. 

Hard to believe that’s true, really, when Rin takes a look around the bar at all the various Akatsuki and patrons. Even the rougher looking patrons are good looking, here. It’s not that she doesn’t think she’s attractive- she knows she’s attractive, on some level- but she’s not, say, the woman across from her who could pass for an international model of some kind.  _ Kakashi and Obito don’t seem to mind _ , her traitorous brain reminds her, thinking of the way they’d looked practically feral when she changed earlier. And Kakashi and Obito are on either side of her now, acting for all the world like they  _ own _ her, which makes her stomach twist in an unidentifiable way she’s not comfortable examining just yet. 

She’s a bit out of her depth here, as much as she hates to admit it. As much as Konan is actually hitting on her, this is also probably a test, because the Akatsuki are technically allied with the Senju and the Uchiha but Rin? Rin is new, fresh blood, a replacement, a stand in. Here on the graces of Obito and Kakashi, who are clearly (to her, at least, which says something about how well she’s gotten to know them) tense under Konan’s scrutiny. She’s supposed to be filing in for Tenzo, who’s probably not this much of a wallflower during business, so maybe if she just- 

“Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink if you can beat me at the table,” she says, leaning forward and fluttering her eyelashes at the other woman, surprising herself and  _ definitely _ Kakashi if the sudden exhale of breath against her arm is anything to go by. The lipstick on her mouth is sticky and strange but it seems to fit right when she smiles, smirks, looks up at Konan under the good mascara she rarely uses and sees the faint hint of pink appearing on the other woman’s cheeks. Konan whistles, grinning at her like a fox in the dead of night, and nods her head. 

“Put your money where your mouth is, then, sweet thing,” she purrs, slipping out of the booth with the same fluidity she’d entered it. “Or I’m sure I could find somewhere better for you to put it later, if you like.” 

“Damn,” Obito laughs, squeezing her knee once Konan is out of earshot again. “You learn that one from Tsunade too?” Rin huffs, a little annoyed despite herself at Obito’s insinuation, and takes a big gulp of the cosmo he’d brought her. 

“You act like I’ve never flirted with a woman before, Uchiha,” she snipes, leaning more fully against Kakashi, who takes her weight without complaint, looking at his boyfriend with smug eyes over the top of Rin’s head. 

“Oh?” Obito leers, wiggling his eyebrows again and flashing canines at her as he leans in towards the two of them. It’s a flash of what could be, what should be, what she wants, before Kakashi snorts and reaches around her to shove Obito back. 

“We have a job to do,” he says, nodding towards the back room where Rin assumes the poker tables are. “Quit thinking with your dick, moron, I’m not blowing you in the bathrooms here again. Floor’s too sticky.” She squeaks without even meaning to, flushing all the way red to think about the two of them- Obito’s hands in Kakashi’s hair, Kakashi’s mouth around his cock, the way he’d flush and groan and look so  _ perfect _ on his knees. 

“True,” Obito sighs regretfully, the two of them barely seeming to register the spiral they’ve just sent Rin down. “Next time, I suppose. Sasori says Kakuzu will deal us in as soon as the next round starts.” 

* * *

Kakuzu should scare her, probably, but in truth he’s less frightening than Tsunade on a very hungover Monday. She’d re-read the rules of the game on the way to the club, pretending she was scrolling through facebook while she frantically looked up “how to play poker good” on google. The men around the table all seem to be staring her down, even as Konan winks lasciviously at her over her hand of cards, and Obito nudges his leg comfortingly against hers. It takes her a few rounds to get the hang of it, watching them with the intensity that she might reserve for a particularly complicated procedure. Every jab seems to roll right off her, every compliment, every sly wink- every time someone talks to her, she meets Kakashi’s eyes across the table and she remembers that this is a job. She’s good at doing jobs. 

Her first year of college, she worked a job at a club in downtown Konoha near the university, next to the coffee shop where she used to do all her studying. The uniform was short, tight, black and pink and modeled after the type of maids you never see outside of pornos. She was pretty good at getting tips, back then, leaning over tables and pouting her lips in a way she’d never thought herself capable of, letting men get a glimpse of the seam running up the back of her stockings for an extra five and another couple bucks towards her rent. One night, Jiraiya had found her walking home after her car had broken down and she didn’t have the money to fix it quite yet. How he found her, she still doesn’t know, but she can recall the look in his eyes when he pulled up next to her on the cold sidewalk.

“Kinda young to be working there, aren’t you?” he’d asked, ushering her into his car and setting his phone GPS to her address automatically. She didn’t bother to ask how he knew it. “Does Tsunade know what you’re doing at night?” 

“I assume she knows I have to eat, just like everyone else,” Rin said tightly, something in her chest prickling at the assumption in his tone. She wasn’t stupid, she knew full well even then what he does for money, and she knew what kind of things he wrote, got published, used as a facade for his other business with the Senju. He hadn’t exactly been in a position to judge, then or now. Jiraiya had just hummed, the sound of the blinker loud in the car as he turned down another empty street. She had to be up in less than six hours to meet her cohort at the labs. God, the bone-tired feeling had followed her everywhere, back then. 

“I’m not gonna tell you you’re better than that work,” he said, when he parked in front of her place. “Because there’s no shame in what you’re doing in the first place. A job’s a job,” he laughed, mirthless and somehow comforting at the same time. “You and I both know that.” He watched her carefully, like she might lash out at him, probably the training of years of being by Tsunade’s side. “Just don’t be stupid, alright? At least let someone give you a ride home when you get off this late.” 

“I just did,” she pointed out, petulant and nineteen and so fucking exhausted. He just laughed at her again, shooing her out of his car and watching her make her way to the front door. The next morning, there was a voicemail on her answering machine from a local mechanic, offering her a free repair, and about ten thousand dollars she didn’t remember making in her savings account. 

Here at the poker table, Hidan folds with a moue of disappointment, leaning his arm across the back of Deidara’s chair. The blonde also pushes his cards in, swearing under his breath. One by one, they fall, until she’s staring at Kisame, watching the man smirk as he shuffles his cards confidently and raises an eyebrow at her. She frantically wracks her brain while staring at her cards, thinking of the things she’d read on the way over, and looks down at her meager pile of chips. She doesn’t have much more than what she’d started with. She shoves her entire pile in. Obito shifts beside her, his foot knocking hers, a question- Kisame grins like a feral man set loose, and shoves the entire, huge pile of his chips in as well. 

“Drop ‘em,” Kakuzu says, flipping the house for all of them to see clearly, pushing them further towards the center of the table.  _ Queen, queen, queen, nine, two _ . “Three of a kind.” 

“Full house,” Kisame says, silver grille glinting in the dim lighting. He eyes her like he might eat her alive.  _ Ten, ten, ten, king, king _ . She thinks of the way Konan propositioned her earlier, and wonders if he might try the same thing, if she doesn’t beat him here. 

“Ah,” Rin says, clearing her throat, before spreading her cards out on the table. “Straight flush.”  _ Ace, king, queen, jack, ten of hearts _ , laid out against the red velvet of the table. Obito crows victoriously next to her, clapping his knee as Kisame cusses spectacularly, throwing himself back in his chair. Obito drags the massive pile of chips in towards her, shoving them at her spot with an infectious grin on his face.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Kisame growls, pointing an accusing finger at Obito. “I like Itachi much better.” 

“Yeah,” Hidan snorts. “Because Itachi is pretty jailbait and he doesn’t tell Madara when you don’t settle your tab on time.” 

“Sorry I’m too old for you, Kisame,  _ darling _ ,” Obito croons obnoxiously, fluttering his eyelashes at Kisame and curling his hand down to cup her shoulder. He’s so fucking warm, warm like her cheeks, even though she’s managing to steel her expression pretty well. Kakuzu clears his throat, obviously annoyed with them, as he gestures for them to return their cards to him for another round. 

“You’re such a bitch,” Kisame mutters while they all watch Kakuzu shuffle, and Kakashi laughs, low and long. 

“All Uchiha are bitches,” he says conversationally, grabbing the cards Kakuzu slides towards him. “I thought you’d know that by now, Hoshigaki. You’ve fucked enough of them.” 

“It must be an STD, then,” Kisame snipes back. “Because apparently you’ve contracted it from Obito.” 

One barely averted fist fight later and ten rounds later, Rin has an impressive pile of chips in front of her. Obito has signaled that it’s time to go, even though she’s not sure she wants to. She’s actually having fun, even if the smoky air is a bit hard on her lungs, and she’s a little nervous about the amount of weapons everyone at the table seems to have on their person. When they drop her off at home, she has the sudden urge to kiss them both goodbye, although she manages to subsume it down into a friendly wave while they watch her walk to her porch and unlock the door. 

She falls asleep with the knowledge that she is swimming far beneath the waves, her hair smelling like the smoke in the bar and faintly, faintly of Obito’s cologne. 

No, Rin is not very ordinary anymore, is she?

* * *

After Rin comes to the bar with them for poker, Kakashi dreams of her and Obito like a drowning man, sunk deep in a river that suffocates only him. The Hatake curse, to love so deeply and feel so strongly, written on the very fabric of his being and sewn into his bones. He has always been weak for the way Obito praises him, so full of love, so sincere and unrelenting. The way he wakes beside the other man, reaches out a hand to call Kakashi lovely, wonderful, worth it and entirely theirs. It transfers over into his sleep, when he finds himself abruptly on his knees, kneeling there in Rin’s office. His dream-Rin sits on her spinning desk chair, legs crossed demurely, skirt over her knees and white coat still on. She’s wearing those stupid Dansko clogs, the ones he always wants to slide off her feet because they look clunky and dumb and so, so endearing for some reason. So he does, because in the dream he can do whatever he wants. In the dream, he can reach out and touch her whenever, however, forever. He reaches up with careful hands and slides the clogs off, tosses them behind him, not a care in the world for where they might land, and her stockinged feet twitch and spread. She scoots forward until she’s framing his shoulders with her soft thighs. He shudders. 

He knows what she smells like from having her so close to him in the booth at the bar, but this is her plus the thick taste of arousal on his tongue, and the way her eyes are looking down at him- the flush of pink on her cheeks, the silky dress buttons he wants to slide his fingers through to press to warm skin underneath, the slight prickle of soft leg hair on her inner thigh where she hasn’t shaved in a few days- it’s overwhelming. Suddenly, he knows familiar fingers in his hair, and Obito is behind him, pressing him even closer to their queen. Obito holds him almost cruelly, shoves his legs between Kakashi’s until he’s wobbling, kneeling wide with his cock so hard and his pants tight. Rin drags her skirt up higher and higher while she watches them grapple, push, find their balance. 

“You’re so pretty,” Rin says, watching Obito grasp his face and open his mouth with a distinctly un-gentle thumb. His boyfriend presses against his teeth, drags across his tongue, moans rumbling through his back when Kakashi wraps his lips around the digit and sucks. “So lovely, Kakashi, so perfect for us.” The praise is intoxicating, sending heat through him, and Obito just laughs and laughs and laughs until Kakashi is spinning from the weight of it and the way her eyes seem to see into him down to his very bones. 

“Go on,” Obito rasps, even as Kakashi’s head is whirling, and he knows he’s desperately pushing back against his boyfriend, looking for friction, or heat, or anything at all they’re willing to give him. “Show her how  _ lovely _ you can be, Kashi.” And his hand on Kakashi’s head presses him down, his face to her underwear and his breath dragging a moan from her chest and the smell of her making him gasp. The dream is like a fever, dizzying him, the simple fact of how badly he wants to fuck her with his tongue and eat her out like a starved man, how heavy Obito’s hand in his hair is, pushing him until he can barely breathe. His knees hurt from the hard floor of her office, as he abruptly realizes that anyone could find them, and when she arches, scrapes at his shoulders with normally-gentle hands, coming on his flushed red face, Kakashi whines himself awake to a pounding heart and a throbbing erection and an entirely sweat-soaked undershirt. 

He doesn’t wait for Obito to wake all the way up, just shoves his boyfriend over and shakes him awake enough and yanks his boxers off, sucking him down like it’s the only thing that can keep him breathing. 

“Fuck,” Obito hisses, his hands in Kakashi’s hair just like they had in his dream. “ _ Fuck _ , Kashi, what-”

“I need you,” Kakashi gasps out, managing, before he swallows Obito again and his boyfriend decides to ride the wave of his lust out. He’s lucky they’re both like this, willing and ready and perpetually in a state of excessive attraction towards each other. “I need you,” he slurs, pressing his teeth to Obito’s thigh and relishing in the rough drag against his hair when Obito yanks him up for a sloppy kiss. 

“Okay, darling, okay-” Obito pants, rolling him over into the bed and scrambling for the container of lube in the bedside table, and thank god because he gives it to Kakashi as hard as he needs it, until the echoes of his dream are faded out enough to be bearable and Kakashi can breathe again. Fuck. 

Somehow he knows it’s only going to get worse.

“Why is this  _ happening _ ,” he groans, when Obito’s come is dripping down his thigh and they’re panting and spent, staring at the ceiling. “It’s your fault.”

“Maybe,” Obito says breathlessly, but he couldn’t look more unrepentant.

* * *

“I heard you won at poker.” Tsunade looks at her over a latte with Jiraiya’s name scrawled on the side of it in barista sharpie. “Seems like you don’t take after me as much as I thought,” she laughs, and Rin hides her grin behind the chart she’s scanning. 

“It wasn’t too hard,” she brushes it off, shrugging under her white coat and ticking boxes on the patient’s forms. “Kisame’s not that great at bluffing.” Tsunade’s appraising eyes drag down the side of her face, and her mentor frowns briefly before patting her shoulder and passing her in the hallway. 

“Don’t let them drag you too deep unless you’re sure about them, Rin,” the older woman says, as she opens the door to her office. “I’m sure you’re well aware of… possessive… an Uchiha can be.”  _ Unfortunately _ , Rin thinks, remembering the flowers she found on her doorstep this morning with nothing more than a henohenomoheji on the calling card,  _ it’s probably a little too late for that, shishou.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to talk to me more about Naruto in general or this fic in particular I am on the Naruto side of tumblr @ slowkage as of this month! I hope you all enjoy!


	4. May, June

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madara enters the ring, and is an unmitigated asshole. Kiri enters the ring, and is even worse. 
> 
> Things escalate very, very quickly, and Rin makes a decision about what she's willing to fight for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning that this is the chapter that includes the violence tag! I promise it gets better after this and there's absolutely NO major character death!

Madara Uchiha is…. something else. Not something very  _ nice _ , from what Rin can tell, despite the way he allows Obito close to him and even nods in thanks to Kakashi after the younger man opens the door for them. Tsunade, Jiraiya- even Shizune had warned her about him. 

“He prefers the old family ways,” Tsunade told her, tossing a bundle of files her way. “He would prefer to see me instead of you as well, I’m sure, but there’s no use in that. We’ve had our hands full dealing with both families for years. I’m giving you the Uchiha case load because if I don’t, I’m going to murder someone sooner rather than later.” 

“So you’re handing them all over to me?” Rin flipped through the files, thumbing the false names on each one. She recognizes Obito’s at the top. _ Karasu, karasu, karasu _ \- the old ways, Tsunade said. “Gee, thanks.” 

“You’ve been fine with the brats so far, haven’t you? You have them practically living in your pockets, according to Minato. Don’t let Madara bully you, Nohara. Chin up, remember your honorifics, you’ll do fine. And I won’t be in the ground any sooner than Jiraiya can send me there himself.” 

Now, Madara is sitting on her exam table, arms crossed and a completely blank expression on his elegant face. He shows bare signs of age, crow’s feet around his eyes and a few threads of silver in his hair, but for a man that must be in his mid-fifties he’s impressively well preserved. Obito sprawls over the chair to the side, ostensibly playing some game on his phone- but Rin’s seen him glance up at her far more times than he would if he was truly engaged. 

“Uchiha-san,” she says, as measured as she possibly can be. The old ways, the old ways- she bows slightly, washing her hands at the sink as she would for any other patient. “What can I do for you today?” 

“Get me my actual doctor, for one, Nohara,” Madara replies, a steel knife in her gut, his voice piercing and unpleasant but teetering just on the line of forced politeness. Obito looks up sharply, his visible eye narrowing, and he sits up more in his seat. She’s almost certain that he wants to say something, barely restrained. More restrained than she expects, given that Kakashi isn’t in here with them. Kakashi is sitting out in the waiting room, having gestured them ahead in a manner suggesting he does, sometimes, know what privacy means. A small part of Rin really wishes he was here. As nebulous as things are around the three of them right now, with her heart overflowing on a doomed crush she can’t always subsume into professionalism or simple friendliness, she knows he’d have her back. 

“Ah,” Rin hedges, keeping her voice as kind and firm as possible. “I’m afraid Dr. Senju transferred you to my care last week. She has a rather overwhelming caseload, and has established me as the primary doctor for your...  _ family _ .” At that, Madara fairly seethes. For a moment, his presence is overwhelming in the room. He is ten feet tall, long hair bristling behind him, every inch the shadow that stalks their city’s streets. She remembers that this man is a killer, a thief, the cold blooded king even death seems to defer to. It seems impossible that this Madara loved Obito, who is all blustering summer day and swirling currents, enough to take him into the main Uchiha home when his parents died.  _ God _ , she thinks briefly-  _ these people are Kakashi’s in-laws _ . “Is there something I might be able to help you with today?” she tries again. 

“ _ You _ are the doctor,” Madara says, frigid enough to freeze the very air in her lungs. “Why don’t  _ you _ tell me what I need?” Obito looks like he’s biting his tongue clean off, keeping his mouth shut, his cheeks tinting what Rin now knows is an angry red. She takes a deep breath. This is a test, just like everything else is, with these people. It was a test when Kakashi and Obito showed up at her apartment, it was a test when Hashirama and Mito ‘coincidentally’ ran into her at her favorite coffee shop on the weekend while they were babysitting Naruto, it was a test when Kagami brought Shisui into the clinic with a broken arm- everything to push her, further and further, to see what she’ll do. Rin knows she didn’t grow up in their families, but sometimes the distrust stings a little. She has to guess what he wants, here, what will sway him in her favor, like shooting in the dark and hoping to god she gets a bullseye. She looks at the chart in her hands, then back up at how Madara is sitting stiffly, slightly favoring his right side, hasn’t moved an inch since she entered. His suit jacket looks impeccable, although the button up beneath it is a little off center. Aoba had taken his vitals when putting him in the room, and his blood pressure and heartbeat seem high, while his temperature is slightly elevated. There’s a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. Madara Uchiha doesn’t seem like someone who sweats easily. 

She sets the chart and clipboard down on the counter with a resounding clack-clang of metal and wood and crosses her own arms, leaning back against the tile, watching Madara with carefully blank eyes. 

“You have either been shot, stabbed, or in some way had a bone broken,” she says. “Your blood pressure is too good for you to be internally bleeding, so I will assume that if you are wounded, it’s in a non-vital location. Therefore, if you don’t cooperate with treatment, I’ll simply make a note on your chart saying you refused my care, and send you on your way to find someone who will put up with being stonewalled. Medicine is a partnership, Uchiha-san, and it requires something from both parties. I will leave a gown on this counter for you to change into, and if I return to an empty room, I will assume you’re not interested in my help.” She turns slightly towards Obito, who watches her with a dark, assessing gaze even as Madara’s fury grows even more palpable. “Obito, you can knock on my door when Uchiha-san is ready, you know which one’s my office.” 

The gentle click of the door shutting behind her ignites something in her, an anger she’s been withholding. Staring at her diplomas on the wall of her office, clenched fist around the tube of the stethoscope her grandfather bought her for her graduation- she’s so upset by the audacity of a man like that, coming in to her office, where her name is on the front door just like Tsunade’s or Shizune’s or Ebisu’s, and disrespecting her like this. The old ways, huh? Rin remembers what it was like to deal with the old ways in the hospital, the turn of Tsunade’s bloodthirsty smile when an older doctor tried to speak over her or some man assumed she was a nurse. 

_ Nurses are worth their weight in gold _ , Tsunade said, grinning teeth like a wolf in the dark.  _ Don’t you ever disrespect them by assuming I’m one. I’m not  _ **_nearly_ ** _ as nice, Mr. Kagetsuen _ .  _ But I am the doctor who saved your son, so I’d like some damn respect for that, at least. _

People discount her for many reasons. She’s short, not the type of striking beauty Kurenai is, nor does she have the porcelain loveliness of Shizune. She’s young, barely graduated into her own practice. She’s been going to college since before she could drive, or legally buy spray paint at the craft store, or even fly unaccompanied. She’s too nice, sometimes, too sweet looking. Everything about her can be overlooked, coddled, patronized, and it drives her up a wall that she’s been pushing since she was fourteen in her first college chemistry lab, less than five feet tall and shaking like a leaf in the cold breeze. The plaques on her desk are proof of her worth, even if people like Madara treat her like an inconvenience or an insult or something stuck to the bottom of their shoe. When Obito knocks on the door and she responds with an affirmative, something,  _ she’ll swallow down her sudden frustration and go back, she will, it’s her job _ \- He takes one look at her face and comes in, shutting the door behind himself. 

“Madara will let you take a look at it,” he says, jaw clenched like he’s been chewing rocks to keep his mouth shut. She wants to tell him it’s a bad habit, but instead she just tugs her coat tighter around herself and slings her stethoscope back around her neck. 

“Thanks,” she looks past him, where the fluorescent lights are flickering slightly in the hallway, through the pebbled glass of her office door. “I’ll be right there.” 

“I’m sorry,” Obito steps closer, lets one hand gently trace the edge of her cheek, looking at her in such a way that she should probably be afraid, but she can’t bring herself to pull away. They’re- friends. Here, in this room, they have to be enough of everything for the kind of job she’s taking on, to keep her going.. “He’s…. like that.” 

“So I’ve gathered,” she says dryly, fighting the urge to press into the heat of his palm. Kakashi is twenty yards from them, probably playing on his phone and wondering what’s taking so long. Madara, who does not seem like a particularly patient man, is waiting. “It’s fine, Obito. I’m not in the habit of punishing men for the sins of their fathers.” 

“It’s not really fine,” he shrugs, taking his hand back and shoving it into his jacket pocket, opening the door for her and letting her pass him into the hallway. There’s a regretful twist to his smile. She doesn’t particularly like seeing him like this, restrained, fettered by the weight of his own family. “He shouldn’t be such a dick to you. None of your patients should be.” 

“Believe me, I know,” she mutters, before they reach the room and she has to put her professional face back on. “But I’ve treated Tobirama, there’s no getting worse than that.” Madara is sitting in much the same way he had been when she’d left, but whatever Obito said to him had some effect- his face is not lined with barely restrained fury any longer. She washes her hands again, slow, methodical, as Obito goes back to his chair and murmurs something to Madara on the way. “I need to see the wound, if you don’t mind, Uchiha-san,” she says, as businesslike as possible, and luckily, he allows it. It’s a nasty little through-and-through, some lucky shot to his arm that has blessedly missed the brachial artery. But better a through-and-through than an entry wound with a bullet stuck somewhere in his arm. It’s not infected, although it easily could become so if he keeps the dirty dressing on it there much longer. She inspects it, cleans it, dresses it, lucky that it doesn’t need more closure or, god forbid, her digging around looking for shards. 

“Well, Doc, will he live?” Obito asks her, grin still a little strained, and Madara huffs under his breath like he’s deathly tired of the younger man, but Rin catches the glint of fondness in his eyes before it fades back out to stoic bitterness. 

“You’ll need a course of cefazolin, and wound dressings in the morning and night. Please don’t attempt to use this arm for lifting anything over five pounds, and don’t go swim or bathe beyond showering for at least ten days.” She scribbles on her pad, intent on making Suzume print an after visit summary that is so thorough it’s practically a novel for Madara to read. “I need a follow up visit from you in two weeks, and you’ll call the office if you experience a fever, redness or warmth around the wound, oozing, discharge, or increased pain. I can prescribe you a moderate painkiller as well, but you won’t be allowed to drive while using it, so you may wish to reserve it for help sleeping in order to maintain your faculties during the day.” She knows how badly men like  _ him _ resent being… altered in function. “Is there anything else you need my assistance with today, Uchiha-san?” Rin asks him, finally looking him straight in the eye. 

“No,” he says, mouth twisted like he’s tasted something bitter and disgusting- his own pride, perhaps. “That will be all, Doctor.” She leaves the two of them there with a professional goodbye she hardly remembers giving, stalking back to her office, grateful for the fact that Suzume always schedules her family patients at the end of the day. Hanging up her coat, her stethoscope, barely recognizing for a moment that there’s another man sitting at her desk with his feet up and a lazy grin under his mask. 

“Madara’s such a fucking asshole,” Kakashi says, twirling her favorite pen. “B texted me, told me I should make it up to you while he takes the King Bitch home.” 

“You shouldn’t let him hear you call him that,” Rin says, her voice wavering slightly with the urge to laugh outright at Kakashi’s clearly well-loved nickname for the Uchiha patriarch. Kakashi just rolls his eyes, dropping his feet down off her desk and spreading his legs, pushing himself back in the rolling desk chair. “He appears to have the ability to be quite, ah. Cruel, to those he dislikes. They won’t miss you?” 

“Miss me?” Kakashi scoffs, winking at her with his discolored eye. “Madara barely tolerates me, sweetheart. At least I know you’ll be good company for me until Obito gets back, without offering to hunt me for sport just to keep us both amused.” And it’s so- familiar, now, the way he inserts himself into her life, sits down like he belongs there, touches her stuff and slouches into place like a puzzle piece, clicking and settling beside her. There’s a noted absence without Obito on her other side, but for the moment, she’s happier seeing someone who doesn’t noticeably carry the Uchiha genes. 

“Coffee?” she asks, after a moment, debating whether or not she’s going to sleep well tonight anyway, and his face brightens noticeably. 

“I’ll buy it with Obito’s family card,” he grins, standing from her chair and grabbing her satchel before she can. “Let’s go, before anyone else can bother you.” 

“Yeah,” she smiles, poking at his side as she feels the tension in her stomach ease a little bit. “I’m busy being bothered by you already, Hatake.” And he acts so wounded, but there’s certainly a smile still underneath his mask. At least someone trusts her enough to let her hold her own, around here. 

* * *

“God, I really like her,” Obito groans, flopping back on their bed like they’re still gangly fifteen year olds staring at the stars on his bedroom ceiling, uncoordinated and full of improper passions. “Kakashi, I  _ really  _ like her.” It should, by all rights, send jealousy burning through his veins, but instead all he feels is sweet compersion and the desire to watch Obito make good on the obscene promise his sexually frustrated body language is making. It’s obvious that watching Rin stand up to Madara has him feeling some type of way, his completely unsubtle kink for strength and weaponized sternness floating to the surface once more. 

“Me too,” he says, finally dragging himself free of that particular fantasy. “Especially now that we know she can stand up to Madara.” He has to admit, Rin’s competence does the same to him. There’s something about the steel in her eyes that’s so compelling, the way that she manages to be so kind and yet take absolutely no shit. When she uses that particular voice, firm and warm and captivating, Kakashi has to wonder what she’d sound like ordering him around in a different context. 

When he crawls up on the mattress beside his boyfriend, Obito pounces- his hands banding tight around Kakashi’s legs as he shoves his thighs apart so he can fit his mouth around the head of Kakashi’s cock and suck mercilessly, dragging a shout out of his boyfriend with practiced ease. He shakes Kakashi’s trembling hands off his head without looking, pressing them into the mattress and ordering him to keep them there, tangled up in the duvet like it could possibly ground him when Obito is so intent upon tossing him out to sea. Obito drags a calloused thumb down the length of his dick, handling him infuriatingly gently in one moment and then roughly sucking him the next. It’s not, well-  _ hard  _ to get him hard, bucking up into Obito’s mouth with soft sounds tumbling from his throat, grasping at the sheets for purchase, giving it up for Obito’s emotional, sappy words that spill across his hip bone like sweet honey.

For the rest of the evening, he lets Obito explain the ways he would like to  _ like  _ Rin in graphic detail, rolling over him in their bed and allowing him to wring Kakashi absolutely dry. He’s seen the way Rin looks at them lately (her eyes in the bar, on the side of his face, had been searing, compelling, infuriatingly far away.) When he sits at her desk and watches her laugh, head thrown back… When he sees the way Obito teases her, or finds himself wishing to reach out and touch the stray hairs that frame her face like a halo… It becomes possible, probable, perfect within his chest. 

Three days ago, he asked her what she would be doing if she wasn’t taking care of their hopeless asses, when he brought Genma in to get stitches after hours. Rin had just rolled her eyes in the moment, giving Genma his wound care instructions and putting him in the system for a follow up visit in a few days. 

“Trouble would find me,” she told Kakashi, once Raidou had picked Genma up and the two of them were walking out towards her car. “If I wasn’t taking care of you, I’m sure something else would have come up by now.” 

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic,” Kakashi swept a hand across the back of her shoulder, picking off a single dried leaf stuck on the weave of her cardigan and holding it out to her, an offering for a goddess he was entirely too happy to serve. She smiled at him, soft and warm, and he felt it down to the pit of his stomach. 

“Don’t worry,” she said, leaning up to kiss his masked cheek before she ducked into her car and started the engine. “I  _ like  _ trouble, Hatake.” He watched her drive away with wide eyes, heart in his throat, inexplicably shaken by the simplest of gestures and grasping for something to set him straight once more. Obito really liked her.  _ Kakashi  _ really liked her. Rin, he was starting to think, also really liked  _ them _ .  _ She did just say that, basically _ , the unhelpful little Obito in the back of his head said smugly. 

Now if only certain kinds of trouble (Madara, always Madara, that sour old fuck) liked her as well.

* * *

“I  _ don’t like her _ ,” Madara says, sitting across the table from Obito and Kakashi, the file full of candids and creepshots he’d had taken of Rin on the mahogany with all the weight of a glowing rod of enriched uranium. The growing storm on his brow is in stark contrast to the ardency of nearly everyone else’s passions for Rin, particularly their own. It feels like it’s about to blow, to melt down, to burn them both alive because there are weeks worth of notes on Rin there (their friend, the good doctor, their confidante, the woman they- well, the woman they haven’t told they like-  _ maybe could love _ \- yet, haven’t even gotten to kiss-) and Madara is sitting here telling them he doesn’t  _ like _ her. “I don’t trust her.”

“To be fair,” Izuna says, leaning back in his chair and examining his half-empty highball glass. “You don’t really trust anyone aside from me and perhaps Hashirama.” Obito wants to laugh, a little hysterically, but he doesn’t. He keeps his mouth shut, years of training weighing down on him. Madara has done him great kindnesses in his life. He’s been the stern uncle as long as Obito can remember, and he took him in when no one else in the family was able to. After this many years at his dinner table, Obito knows when to bite his tongue. Kakashi, however, reaches out to touch the fire with his bare hands, grabbing the file and flipping through it carefully. It wouldn’t do to muss it, to get the papers out of line, to anger Madara further. “Hashirama trusts her,” Izuna points out, though it seems he’s only playing devil’s advocate. Madara’s brow simply grows another storm cloud. The devil carries the Senju name around here, sometimes.

“Rin Nohara,” Kakashi reads out loud, low and steady. Obito can feel his anger, a bit impressed at how little it shows, when he knows Kakashi must also be burning up inside. This is not just an insult to Rin- it’s a line of insults, one after another, to them, to Tsunade, to Jiraiya, to Hashirama and Mito and Minato and Kushina as well. “Graduated high school at age fourteen, entered college that same year. Got high distinctions in undergraduate, and graduated with honors cum laude from medical school, completed residency under Tsunade Senju. Second youngest doctor to ever come out of Konoha med. Family lives in a small suburb, only her grandfather and great aunts remain. No siblings, no parents, no roommates. She takes her coffee with two creams and three sugars, buys vegetables from the farmer’s market every Tuesday evening, and frequents a local gym, apparently mostly for weight training.” He looks up at Madara with an expression that Obito would never want directed towards himself, not in a million years. “Did you also find out her favored brand of shampoo, and what size bra she wears? I’ve been wondering, myself.” 

“Don’t be insolent,  _ boy _ ,” Madara spits. “I simply did the back work you and the Senju were too lazy to do. You let her in on a promise and a prayer, and seem to be operating under the assumption that she’s going to keep being your nursemaid indefinitely, with nothing but her word to keep her there.” 

“Don’t be rude, Hatake,” Izuna admonishes, but there’s far less bite to his voice than his older brother’s. “Consider this from our perspective, hmm? She was hired for a job based solely on Tsunade’s recommendation, interviewed only by her and Shizune, and given control of our entire family’s caseload at the clinic within a few months. If the Senju were planning to stab us in the back, you must admit that this is a suspiciously perfect excuse, no?” Kakashi bristles like a dog, and Obito reaches out a hand to grab his thigh, hard enough to bruise. The silence between them is deafening. He remembers another conversation, a little like this, back when they were younger. Madara asked him if he was certain he loved Kakashi, if that was truly his precious person, if he was willing to lay down his life for the Hatake boy, son of a disgraced cop and adopted child of a mafia boss. It’s not the same question today, because Madara does not know they love her, nor is he willing to take the good nature of the Senju at face value any longer, apparently. 

“So this is how you finally lose it, old man,” Obito says, after a good few moments, waiting for Madara to say anything else, for Izuna to justify their distrust, or the insult they’ve made to the entire younger generation of the Hidden Families. “Challenging the Senju over a civilian doctor who’s done nothing but help us.” 

“She’s  _ not _ a civilian,” Madara hisses, slamming his hand on the table, hair practically frizzing with the energy coming off him. “She worked at an Inuzuka nightclub for two years, her rotations were moved specifically so that Tsunade could mentor her, I found evidence of transfers to her account from one of Namikaze’s known aliases before she had even graduated- there’s more to this woman than you’re seeing, and you’d do well to be a little more judicious in who you let under your skin, Obito- _ chan _ .” Kakashi growls at that, the way Madara infantilizes him like he hasn’t in  _ years _ , but Obito just stands up and grabs the files from Kakashi’s hands, tossing them back on the table. The thud-thwack-flutter as they land is deafening. 

“Pictures are one thing, uncle,” Obito murmurs, measured and just loud enough for Madara and Izuna to hear him. “Files, and background checks, and all that. I know she worked at the Inuzuka night club. I’ve heard about how Tsunade mentored her, and how Minato helped her out financially when her grandmother was ill and she was sending all her money back home. I also know that she saved my life, and probably Kakashi’s as well, numerous times over. I seem to recall that she treated you as well, to the best of her considerable abilities, despite the fact that you were an unmitigated  _ asshole  _ to her. If you had asked me, I would have given you all of this  _ collateral _ you apparently desperately wanted. I got it months ago.” He looks at them with little more bravado than he had back when he was sixteen, confessing to the crime of falling in love with a Senju boy like Kakashi. Like Madara could shame him, even then, when he had always been begging in Hashirama’s shadow for something of the other man and his deadly, gorgeous wife. Like Obito doesn’t know he gets fucked by the Senju patriarch and his wife on the regular. Like he has any leg to stand on whatsoever with his censure of Obito and Kakashi. “So pictures are one thing, and so is healthy suspicion, but if you lay a hand on her, I will leave this family and never look back.” 

Kakashi shoves his chair back with a squeak on the nice hardwood floors, stalking out of the room a bare moment before Obito turns to join him. It’s the first time he’s ever shown his back to Madara during an argument, the first time he’s ever felt strong enough to burn this house to the ground, the first time he’s left a fight without the honorifics and the old ways and the politesse that his baa-chan had pressed into him when he was a child. 

In this moment, Obito wants to set something on fire like he never has before. Perhaps Madara is right. Rin is dangerous-

Just not in the way Madara thinks she is.

* * *

“My god,” Izuna says, setting his glass down and staring at the still swinging door while his older brother  _ seethes  _ with anger at their disobedient nephew. “Madara, I think they  _ love  _ her.”

“It’s been six months,” Madara hisses. “Six months! How has she gotten this far under their skin in  _ six months _ , Izuna, I thought I taught Obito better than this- this  _ carelessness _ , thinking with his  _ dick- _ ” Izuna coughs, pushing his ponytail back over his shoulder and looking towards the windows. 

“I seem to recall a similar conversation, years ago,” he muses absently, though he knows full well that what he’s about to say will only infuriate Madara further. “With Indra-ji, and Ashura-ji, and Father, about a boy you’d met. Father knew full well he was Butsuma’s son, and didn’t think anything good could come of it.”

“Hashirama was different,” Madara huffs, crossing his arms and turning from his brother. 

“Was he?” Izuna raises an eyebrow, glancing down at Madara’s hand, where a specific thick titanium ring with a noticeable band of petrified wood sits heavy on his finger. “Was he really that different, Madara, or have you simply forgotten what young love feels like?”

“He already has a perfectly acceptable man,” Madara says, twisting the ring, gritting his teeth, his eyes glinting fiery red. “We vetted Hatake years ago.” 

“As if you’re any stranger to the ways in which three people might fit together,” Izuna says, laughing, as he gets up. “Don’t be wilfully obtuse, Aniki, I’ve walked in on you and Mito and Hashirama enough times to have been permanently scarred by it all.” He leaves Madara at the table, looking down at the stacks of papers, the files that represent his obsessive love for his family and the burning, deep compulsion to keep them safe. Madara  _ doesn’t  _ trust Rin Nohara, and he certainly claims quite vehemently not to like her either, but Izuna is finding himself rather fond of the woman the more he hears about her. He’s got to call Mikoto- she’s going to  _ love  _ this. 

* * *

Across town, Rin wakes up gasping at three am, thinking about the way Kakashi had pressed Obito into the side of his truck when they were leaving her house a couple weekends ago, kissing him like no one was watching. Maybe they really didn’t think anyone was watching, which makes her cheeks burn bright and feeds the shame twisting in her belly along with the roiling, burning arousal that comes easy with the thought of the two of them together. They fit like nothing else, big hands and long legs and perfect scars that match one another. It’s easy to imagine herself in between them, pressed tightly, with their mouths on her and their hands inside, tearing her apart and making her whole anew- just like it’s impossible to imagine, because whatever they have is so intense, the work of nearly two decades as confidantes, that she can’t help but feel that she’d never fit there at all. 

Madara has left a bitter taste in her mouth, a weight sitting on her chest and crushing her down, so she can’t help but remember that she’s  _ not  _ like them and she probably never will be. It haunts her in the morning, and for the mornings after that, even when she wakes up to Kakashi’s shit-eating grin outside her front door or Obito’s near incomprehensible drunk texts where he stacked them up in her phone while she slept. But they are flame and she is a moth and so she keeps coming back the same way they do, over and over again, until something- something snaps. And then- Rin is reminded that they’re not  _ good _ people very abruptly, all at once. It is a fall off the cliff into cold water, no breath, no warning. She thinks, in the back of her suddenly blank brain, that it’s good she did a rotation in trauma surgery, back before she decided her specialty. That expertise smoothes out the screaming inside her skull, lowers her heart rate, forces her eyes to stop watering and her lungs to stop trying to pump air so goddamn fast. She trusts that Obito and Kakashi wouldn’t turn the violence they’re clearly capable of (she stitches the cuts, bandages knuckles, rotates wrists, she knows it intimately with the tips of her fingers and the pile of blood soaked rags at the bottom of her trash can--) on her. She generally trusts that Jiraiya (Minato, Kushina, the rest of the Senju at least) wouldn’t either, at least as long as she’s offering her services to them. But she forgets, sometimes, however briefly, that there is another side to every fight that Obito and Kakashi emerge from. 

She’s sitting in her office one night finishing paperwork while Obito and Kakashi fuck around with a puzzle her grandfather sent her when the door to the clinic bangs open and they hear the sound of heavy boots. She doesn’t have enough time to react (Obito and Kakashi already have their guns out, knives out, teeth out-) when the Kiri men bust through the door to her office and her heart nearly stops. She wants to think she goes with a fight (her arm hurts, her teeth hurt, her hands hurt where she’d scrabbled for anything to improve their odds) but when Obito and Kakashi go down, there’s not much hope for her beyond keeping her eyes open to look for any opportunity they can use later. They inject Obito and Kakashi both with something, tie her arms behind her back, and when she comes back to herself a little a few hours later, she suspects they may have gotten her on the head at some point too. 

It’s fucking cold in the warehouse, even in the summer, concrete and fear and adrenaline all scooping her hollow and leaving her to shiver between the boys on the floor and listen for the sound of the Kiri boots coming back for them. In that room, Rin is certain that she’s going to become collateral damage. Every half hour or so, they threaten her with knives, clearly just to see the fear in her eyes, but when Obito finally wakes up, the attention all turns to him. 

The sound of their boots connecting with his body make it hard to keep quiet, and their questions about Madara’s operations even more so. 

“Bastard,” Obito groans, leaning his head back against the brick behind him and spitting blood at the feet of the Kiri enforcer standing before them. “You’re so fucking  _ dumb _ if you think we’ll tell you jack shit. You think I wanna be the one who betrayed Madara Uchiha?” Rin is fairly sure he’s concussed now, after his head made contact with the concrete. Even in the dimly lit room, she can see the redness of his eye, outsized and jittery pupil tracking the man in front of him. She grips the scalpel behind her back, the last thing she managed to grab before they threw her in the car, and spares a glance at Kakashi, who’s still out cold. If the Kiri men had taken from the stash at the clinic like she thinks they did and given Kakashi and Obito the same dose of pentobarbital, it’ll take Kakashi about an hour longer to come out of it compared to his larger boyfriend. 

“Doesn’t really matter what you say now,” the man shrugs, grinning sharp at them in a way that quickly, unsettlingly reminds Rin of Kisame. “Matters more what you say in about an hour, when the boss comes by.” He rears back and kicks Obito right in the ribs with a steel-toed boot, hard enough that the crunch is audible. She takes a deep breath over the sound of Obito’s pained, gritted exhale, the grinding of his teeth. Rin doesn’t know who the boss of Kiri is, doesn’t want to find out, doesn’t want to know what happens when Obito doesn’t talk (he won’t, she knows he won’t) and Kakashi doesn’t either and all that’s left is her. When they’d walked- half tossed, half shoved- her through the old warehouse, she’d seen about ten men sitting around a portable heater with cards and liquor and a copious number of guns. She knows how to take down one man, remembers all her martial arts lessons, recalls the way her muscles can be leveraged against someone- but ten? Eleven? More, in the other rooms? Shivering and terrified?

Rin closes her eyes when the Kiri enforcer winds up to hit Obito again, and prays that his lungs won’t get punctured by a rib fragment, hoping desperately that they’re valuable enough (Minato’s children, Madara’s heir) that someone is coming. But beyond hope, there is the sharp fact that no one is expecting her anywhere any time soon. There is no one waiting at home for her, nor work at the clinic for another two days, nor someone who might think to check if she’s busy this weekend. She thinks, for a moment, about an evening last week, when she had been watching cooking shows late at night and Obito and Kakashi let themselves into her townhouse, tumbling over one another and laughing and clearly, clearly drunk. Another poker night, this time at an Uchiha club, where Kagami was willing to send them drinks all night and call them a cab at the end of the game. 

“Are you hurt?” she’d asked, hands fluttering over Obito’s chest when Kakashi deposited him on the couch. “Either of you?” 

“No,” Kakashi said, grinning at her in an uncharacteristically loose display of emotion, tugging his mask down to show the glint of his unnaturally sharp canines. Obito whined, kicked at him with a floppy foot, and leaned towards her, cologne and smoke and rum on his breath. 

“In  _ here _ ,” he slurred, taking her hand between his and pressing it to his chest. “We  _ missed _ you, Rin.” 

“You brought me lunch yesterday,” she pointed out, laughing despite herself as Kakashi slunk around the other side to slide onto the open space on her couch. “It’s been like thirty two hours, Obito.” 

“Thirty two hours too many,” Obito said plaintively, widening his one visible eye as much as possible and cocking his head at her like a begging puppy. He tugged her closer with her hand, sincere, pink cheeks and gleaming teeth and something unsettlingly hungry there lurking behind his expression. The closer he got to her, the warmer she was, and the more Kakashi’s presence behind her loomed. 

“Well,” she’d said helplessly, smiling anyway because Obito’s smile was infectious regardless of the circumstances, and her heart was beating out of her chest. Kakashi leaned forward, abruptly, up against her back until he could look at Obito over her shoulder. It was always that way, though, wasn’t it? Obito dragging her forward and Kakashi boxing her in and everything too warm, too much, too many things she’d like to think about but couldn’t bring herself to examine closely. “I’m here now.” 

“Yeah,” Kakashi murmured appreciatively, satisfied, deep, rumbling through both of them until she felt like she might shake apart right there. “You are.” 

Here on the cold concrete, begging to anything listening that Kakashi would wake up already, that the blood Obito’s spitting is from a broken tooth and not internal bleeding, Rin thinks about how she could have reached forward and kissed him. It would have been worth it. A lot of things would have been worth it, when she thinks about how long it’s been since she called her grandfather, how many times she said no to drinks with Shizune and Ebisu and Aoba, how her house is full of loose ends that no one will want to untangle, how she wishes she had the chance to know if Kakashi and Obito kiss differently, would touch her differently, would love her the way she wanted to be loved. Her palms are sweating more than they had the first time she attended a surgery and she’s certain that the Kiri man is going to regret untying her (why tie her up, she’s a 5 foot 2 inch doctor who drives a  _ Prius _ ) as soon as she can get her feet under her. He’s wearing some flimsy pants, not even hard to cut, not with how much she sharpens the scalpels in the clinic to ensure clean incisions. He turns to bend down to look at Obito closer, get a hand up on his jaw and dig in, drawing a hissed sound of intense pain from Obito’s bloody mouth, and she-

One deep breath. 

Two. 

Her feet are under her, her legs are  _ under her again _ , and she remembers dissecting a cadaver in her anatomy lab, being amazed by the vascular network of the body. There are several lengths of arteries in the leg; femoral, tibial, peroneal, popliteal.  _ A man could bleed out from his popliteal artery in as little as two minutes _ , her professor told them as she separated the peroneus and the gastrocnemius with her forceps and her blade. Rin sees the arteries and veins on his leg like it’s Shizune’s life size model and she knows she’s got to aim for the popliteal because it’s low and a little more superficial, hoping the bastard isn’t quick enough to react. When she stumbles, a little numb from sitting on the cold floor, and her hand shakes, and-

She shoves the scalpel into the back of his knee as hard as she can, with all the force of her body, before he can look back at the sound of her falling or react to her movement, jerking her arm to the left as fast as she possibly can. The fabric tears like paper, the blood spurts immediately, the scalpel handle snaps, and the roar of his pain is hopefully indistinguishable enough that his cronies just think it’s Obito getting beaten to shit in here. He swings on her quickly enough to catch her with his fist, a bright burst of pain that flashes across her eyes, but she knows how fast the blood is leaving him, pooling on the floor hot and metallic and bitter. She scrambles back as fast as she can, kicking out at his hands, trying desperately to make sure he can’t grab her, until she runs up against Kakashi’s shallow breath and his still body. Her hands hurt, her whole arm hurts, her face is stinging and throbbing, and Obito lashes out with his leg, tripping up the Kiri enforcer until he gurgles and collapses fully to the floor, head hitting the concrete with a sickening thunk. 

_ First, do no harm _ , she hears Tsunade’s voice echoing in her ears.  _ First, do no harm. First, do no harm.  _

_ First- _

“Rin,” Obito bites out, low and pained. “Rin, I need you to-  _ fuck- _ ” he coughs wetly, twisting in his spot until he’s up on his knees. “Hey, hey, look at me, okay? It’s okay, I promise, it’s okay.” It’s not, really. She’s watching a man that she stabbed bleed out on the concrete floor of a warehouse owned by a rival gang to the one she helps out of her family practice clinic, which is nothing at all she’d anticipated when she accepted a place at the Konoha medical school. It’s pretty fucking far from okay, at this point, but she’s cold and a little numb and remembering how Kakashi looked at her with stars in his eyes when she called him  _ honey _ , months ago, remembering how Obito smiles at her when he thinks she’s not looking-

His eyes are as soft as she remembers them, when she finally manages to drag her gaze off the twitching man lying in a pool of his own arterial blood. 

“Oh, fuck,” she says, faintly. Kakashi shudders behind her, moving a little bit and coughing groggily. The realization that they need to move  _ now _ slams into her like a speeding train. She manages to turn enough to check his pulse, on autopilot, watching his pupils closely when he blinks his eyes blearily and looks up at her with confusion. 

“Nice of you to join the party, Baka-shi,” Obito spits more blood, laughing croakily despite his injuries, and Kakashi snaps to attention with the ingrained suddenness of a soldier’s son. “Can you get his binds, Rin? We, uh, we should go as soon as possible, I’m thinking-” Without thinking too hard about it, she crawls over and grabs the broken blade from a puddle of cooling blood, sawing away at the tough ropes until they come loose and Kakashi can shake blood flow back into his hands. She doesn’t remember getting Obito’s but a minute later his warm palms are on her cheeks, and he’s bending over her even though she’s certain that’s not a good idea with how hard his abdomen had been kicked. Kakashi stands behind him, testing the door of the room they’re in and working a rusty screwdriver from the ground into the lock. It chills her to the core, how little work they’d done on making sure the three of them stayed in this room- because likely, they weren’t planning on them being alive long enough to stage an attempt at escape. 

“Got it,” Kakashi says, still a little wobbly on his feet. Obito drags her up, still gentle despite the way he’s wheezing, shaking a bit, looking paler every minute. The corridor is empty, dark and dripping with accumulated seawater- everything is empty, as she guides them back the opposite way that they were pushed in, hoping there’s an emergency exit and the warehouse isn’t  _ that _ old. The windows high above them are black as tar, barely a star, no light at all, but they manage with what little reflected light comes from the flickering old utility lamps. None of them have their phones on them (her favorite case was nothing compared to a steel-toe boot and the cell that lasted her all the way through medical school is shattered across the clinic parking lot now) but there must be something she can use if they can get outside. Kakashi is holding most of Obito’s weight by the time they find the back door, exit alarm blessedly disconnected, and spill out into the night air. 

There are a couple of cars back here, all empty, and what she thinks is probably an old dock truck for running supplies out from the front gate of the warehouse complex. 

“I could make that run,” Kakashi manages to bite out as Obito groans again and sinks a little further against him, “but I can’t drive it, they fucked up my wrists.” 

“Just get us into it,” she tells him, already steering towards it, looking over her shoulder like she could do literally anything if people are following them. The complete sense of confusion and helplessness is heavy, a rock in her chest that she chokes on every time she breathes. She can drive, though, right? She could find her way back into town from here, somewhere she could patch Obito up without questions.

Rin doesn’t think of herself as a particularly strong person, despite what she’s just done, or the way that she’s managing to limp her way out of a successful kidnapping and interrogation session. But in the moment that they reach the dock truck, as she watches sudden headlights come careening around the corner onto the docks- as she hears the bang of the warehouse door slamming open and the shouting of the Kiri men they’d left behind in the main room- she finds a strength she had previously been unaware of.  _ Low center of gravity _ , she thinks in a daze, unbalancing Kakashi and Obito in their tangle of mutual uprightness and shoving them down behind the truck. Kakashi shouts, Obito groans from the shock of falling on the gravel, and there is only so much yelling from the people piling out of the SUVs that are pulling up on them before she hears the crack of a pistol and feels the hot, breathtaking pain of a bullet ripping through her stomach. There is cotton in her ears and something loud, loud, loud rushing all around, wind and snow and cold, cold fingers. 

“I hope that missed the aorta,” she says, rather weakly, watching the blood flood across her favorite blouse, stumbling back against the truck and sinking to the ground. The headlights flicker. From the gravel and asphalt and wet wood of the dock, she can see the few stars that make it through the fog creeping along the bay. The moon is just a sliver above her when Kakashi’s silver hair comes into view, when he shakes her and she smiles at him through the rapidly spreading icy, lightning-sharp pain in her stomach. He’s cursing and pressing down on her stomach, and the other loud voices are getting closer and closer and closer and Rin thinks about how absolutely beautiful Kakashi is (it’s really unfair) in all situations, even after being drugged with pentobarbital and  _ beaten up _ -

“ _ Hashirama _ ,” Madara roars over their heads- 

“Keep pressing, Hatake,” Tsunade says, her blonde hair like gold falling across her shoulder. “Hey, hey, Nohara-  _ Rin _ , hey,  _ kid _ , I didn’t put in all that work for you to die on me, okay? Keep looking at Hatake, alright-” 

“Okay,” she slurs through a mouth full of wool, glancing up with what seems like an entire day’s worth of effort and meeting Kakashi’s wide, panicked eyes. It feels like his hand is reaching right through her stomach, grabbing her heart, squeezing it between his fingers. “Sorry,” she tells him, mouth forming strangely around the words, but he just laughs a little hysterically and presses even harder. 

“God  _ damn _ you, Rin Nohara,” Kakashi murmurs, wild and unrestrained, face close enough that she can feel his breath on her cold, cold, cold cheeks. “He loves you, you can’t fucking die here-” She chokes on something, coughs, tasting pennies, and Kakashi’s eyes look wet enough that she wonders if maybe, somehow, it had started raining. There is black edging the corners of her vision, there is shouting. All the shouting, always shouting, banging and that same smoky cracking noise until it seems like she’s only heard this catastrophic din her whole life. “ _ I _ love you,” Kakashi says desperately, raw and angry and crying on her. The last thing she sees before she passes out is the moon above her, a silver smile sliding behind the coming thunderclouds as the storm rolls in. 

* * *

She doesn’t dream of anything but those six words, floating in the soft velvety black. 

_ He loves you.  _

_ I love you.  _

There is nothing there in the shadow of death but the promise of something beautiful, if she can just manage to claw her way back up. 

Rin sets her sight on the summit. 


	5. June, July

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things come crashing together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, for the record, mostly smut. Thank you to everyone who's commented <3 When I get the chance to use the computer for a prolonged period of time I'll be sure to comment back at all of you. It truly makes me so, so happy to see people enjoying this story!
> 
> The next chapter coming out will depend on my computer being fixed and hopefully that'll be in the next week or so. Until then, enjoy!

“This is why I track you and Kakashi,” Minato’s unimpressed, rather upset voice greets her through the fog in her head. She can hear the tell-tale beeping of monitors, smell the thick, uncomfortable chemical wave of anesthetic. Her eyelids feel like they’re made of lead. Obito’s raspy laugh brings buds, flowers blossoming, petals falling from the trees in her lungs-  _ he’s okay _ \- and finally she manages to shove her eyes open enough to see the inside of a two patient hospital room, ugly green wallpaper, beige curtains, white tiles and all. Minato sits in one of two chairs between the beds, leaning over a sleepy looking Obito. Kakashi sits in the other, slumped against her mattress, like a mirror image. His jaw is green, black, purple, and the spaces under his eyes are grey-blue-bruised with lack of sleep. It’s the worst she’s ever seen him, but he still manages to take her breath away. “You know, Naruto and Sasuke have been worried sick-.  _ Kushina and I _ have been worried sick about you three. ” 

“We’re okay, Sensei,” Obito mumbles, voice like gravel, threading between the beeps of the hushed room.  _ Oh _ , she thinks.  _ They managed to fix his ribs. _ Lifting her hand feels like a herculean feat, but she manages it, just enough to get her fingertips on Kakashi’s wrist and feel for herself that his heart is beating too. All at once, the weight of it hits her. 

She’s alive. 

“Rin?” Kakashi’s voice is saturated with a particular worry she’s never never heard before, his fingers moving and catching hers, his head lifting and those eyes back on hers again. It feels like the corners of her dry mouth will crack when she manages a smile, meeting his gaze and then looking over his shoulder to see Obito looking back at her with a similarly desperate expression. 

“Hi,” she croaks. “I guess I didn’t die on you after all.” And Kakashi collapses against her with a wet sounding laugh, hands grasping at her through all the tubes and lines and cuffs until he can hold her closer than he had when she was watching her blood spill through his fingertips onto the cold asphalt. 

“I guess not,” Kakashi says, but he says a lot more than that with his mismatched eyes- 

I love you. He loves you.  _ We _ love you. 

She settles back into the bed and smiles over the top of Kakashi’s head at Obito like he had hung the moon right there in their hospital room for the three of them alone. 

* * *

When Kakashi and Obito were twelve, Madara took them to a museum. 

“A day trip,” he told Hashirama, who was supposed to be watching the two of them for Minato. “I’m entitled to take my ward on excursions of cultural enrichment, am I not?” Hashirama, weak as ever for the Uchiha patriarch, simply smiled and handed them each fifty dollars and told them to buy something ‘educational’. Kakashi remembers thinking that Minato was likely to be upset but also hoping this would change something, a little kernel of deep deep wanting for Madara’s approval. Obito came over every day after school to butt his way into Kakashi’s business, got them matching friendship bracelets when Izuna and Kagami took him to Jamaica, followed him everywhere like they were chemically bonded at the hip; but Madara still looked at Kakashi with suspicious eyes. In some way, he understood it. He knew already that what his guardian and his uncle did were not legal, per se, and that the Uchiha family was involved in the same sort of money that the Senju were- above all he knew that no one ever crossed Madara and lived to tell the tale, so the suspicion was more so a healthy paranoia that had clearly kept the older man alive a good many years longer than most. 

“Always fear an old man in a young man’s profession, pup,” Tsunade had told him when he was very very young, pulling him up on the couch between her and Orochimaru while Jiraiya and Sakumo laughed by the fireplace. She tapped the tip of one elegant finger against his nose through the fabric of his navy blue mask and laughed when he scrunched up his face, scowling at her beneath his lightning-struck mop of silver hair. 

“You’re pretty old,” he’d said, twisting his fingers in her kimono jacket as he crawled onto her lap. Even when Kakashi was a cranky, cantankerous little boy, Sakumo had been successful in impressing the Hatake need for physical affection into his very bones. She had roared with mirth at that, tugging on a strand of his hair, kissing his chubby cheeks with sake-scented enthusiasm. 

“I am,” she agreed, “but you’re the only one allowed to tell me that, pup. You’d better be wary of me, hm?” He remembered her words after Sakumo died, watching Jiraiya place a lily on his grave from his tenuous perch in Minato’s arms, stone cold silent when the attendants put his papa in the ground. Sakumo had been a young man, dead because of older men than he, blood on the concrete of the police precinct and sins embedded deeply into the talking uniforms trying to give Kakashi false comfort. And Madara- Madara was an old enough man to be feared, just as Hashirama and Tobirama were, and Indra-jiji before them. 

Still, Kakashi got into the town car with Obito and Madara and watched Hashirama cheerfully wave goodbye, Mito baa-chan sitting on the porch in a sundress sipping sweet tea like nothing strange was happening at all. The museum of modern art in downtown Konoha felt like a minefield and he felt impossibly small standing there on the pavement at its feet looking up at brutalist architecture festooned with bright flags. Ahead of him, Obito chattered away a mile a minute, as though Madara wasn’t boring a hole in the back of Kakashi’s head with his eyes alone. Sometimes, in the right light, Kakashi swore they looked red as the devil. They got their tickets, the two boys shivering a little with the weight of the museum’s overzealous air conditioner, and followed the signs to a new exhibit. The art itself wasn’t memorable- nothing Kakashi can recall, at least, though he’s certain he made polite noises about how educational it all was. One did not simply avoid their purpose when walking anywhere with Uchiha Madara. But his father had taught him to look underneath the underneath, and there was certainly something underneath this thin veneer of recreation. Although Obito didn’t seem to notice, it was markedly odd that the older man hadn’t asked them any questions at all, simply content to wander behind them as Obito dragged them from exhibit to exhibit, exclaiming over how bright or expensive or incomprehensible each piece was. 

The first time Madara said something, it was to remark offhand that the price tag for one of the new paintings in the back gallery was rather large. The second time, he assured Obito that he and Kakashi would sit on the bench in front of said painting and wait for him to use the restroom. They sat there in complete silence, alone in the echoing gallery, for barely a minute before Madara turned to him and caught him in that sanguine gaze. 

“Well?” he asked Kakashi, bored and elegant and colder than the deep sea, jerking his head towards the painting. “How badly do they want to keep it, boy?” And that- that was training not from Sakumo, but from Jiraiya, grudgingly sitting on his shoulders as he walked through the Natural History Museum, listening to the man explain how to check the shifts in guards, the security cameras, the sensors built into the walls. ( _ Are we going to steal a dinosaur, Jiraiya? _ Laughter, bright and sunny.  _ No, Kakashi, we’re not going to steal a dinosaur. _ ) 

“Not very badly,” he scoffed, confident at least in this. “Two man shifts, rotating on the hour presumably. They turn their backs to the piece often, especially when greeting other patrons. Weak wall sensor, four cameras, and probably a proximity sensor as well. They only have walkie-talkies for communication.” Madara looked at him with appraising eyes, then, for once a little less guarded, the first crocus underneath a bitter winter’s damning frost. 

“Correct,” Madara said, sounding rather pleased despite the way he turned quickly from Kakashi, as though to hide the brief softening in his demeanor. “They didn’t want to keep it very badly at all, in the end.” 

“It’s already gone,” Kakashi murmured, head whipping around to look at the painting, eyes widening just slightly over his mask. He stared at the painting, as though he might be able to tell the difference; like he could pick this one specific piece of art out of a million others, even if he’d had weeks to prepare for this unanticipated test. 

“Most people,” Madara said coolly, as he spotted Obito walking back towards them and got up from the bench, “do not have the faculties to spot a well-designed forgery. Just as well, considering how much Sasori paid us for it.” He turned briefly, looking down his nose directly at Kakashi with those ruby-tinted eyes. “Most people  _ also _ do not have the good sense to value what they have until it is gone, Hatake. I trust you will guard the things you wish to keep more carefully than this museum does. Ah, Obito,” Madara dusted his hands brusquely, clapping Obito’s shoulder and steering him back towards the front of the museum. “I find myself wishing for lunch. Come, boys, the cafeteria here will be suitable for our purposes.” 

Kakashi ate his overpriced panini and tomato soup in a bit of a daze, for some reason utterly sure that he’d just received the strangest shovel talk he was likely to ever get in his life. When Minato asked if he’d had fun, looking at Madara over his shoulder with a steel look, Kakashi simply nodded and squeezed Obito’s hand with his sweaty palm, a promise of forever woven between their fingers. 

* * *

Sat between two hospital beds, Kakashi watches Madara level that familiar assessing gaze on the sleeping woman at his side. The older man has been sitting by the window for an hour now without saying much of anything, glancing between his phone and his dozing nephew every so often, but now his eyes rest heavy on Rin’s bruised face. Kakashi is filled with a sudden desire to cover her, tug her blanket up further, yank the bed divider shut. Rin and Obito have been in the hospital for three days now, woken up once yesterday, and this is the first Kakashi’s seen of Madara. 

(“I could  _ kill _ him,” Obito swears, heaving, panting, slumped over against the heavy bag in the back of Gai’s gym. The white bandages over his knuckles are stained pink, rust, yellow. “What kind of trash does he think we are, that her fucking employment record and her goddamn coffee order would make us  _ drop _ her?” He kicks out viciously at the bag, spins around, stalking back towards Kakashi, who had draped himself over a weight bench with a cold pack on his leg where Gai had finally taken him down in their match earlier. “Like I give a fuck if she used to be a stripper for those Inuzuka dogs or whatever-”

“We’ll just take Zetsu up on his offer, hm?” Kakashi drawls, half-joking because even if he would abandon Minato and the rest of the Senju, he doesn’t think the Akatsuki would be half as lenient with them, nor half as trustworthy. “You think Kisame would take us in as his kept men?”

“Fuck you,” Obito says, throwing his sweaty towel over Kakashi’s face just to watch him sputter, sliding down to sit against the bench on the cold gym floor. “I’m at  _ least _ trophy husband material.” 

“ _ You _ won’t have to kill him,” Kakashi murmurs after a moment, dropping a hand to rest in Obito’s damp hair. It should be gross, but he’s rather fond of the way Obito always pushes into his touch anyway. “If he insults her in front of Tsunade, he’ll be dead in five seconds flat.” Blood always speaks louder than words, in the Hidden Families.)

If Madara knows Kakashi is watching him back, he doesn’t show it. He takes more notes on his phone, looks back and forth, huffs softly at some email. When Obito begins to stir, he presses the call button for the nurse like it’s second nature, and asks her for another cup of ice chips before Obito even wakes all the way up. Certainly, Madara and Kakashi got enough practice at this when Obito was in the hospital after the accident in high school. A month in the burn ward and weeks of physical therapy, and Kakashi knows Obito’s order from the kitchens by heart. He likes ice chips when he wakes up thirsty, apple juice before bed, and a plain omelette for breakfast. He hates the vanilla pudding cups, but he likes blue jello and chocolate tapioca. He will refuse your help with his cup, no matter how badly it hurts to use it, so ask for extra straws. When Obito opens his eyes, Madara looks away from Rin with unfailing sharpness, narrowing his eyes at his seemingly perpetually injured nephew. Kakashi swallows heavy, hard, lump in his throat, the old acidic feeling of being in trouble as a 13 year old sitting in the bottom of his stomach even after all these years. 

_ If you lay a hand on her, I will leave this family and never look back.  _

_ You could love her, couldn’t you? _

“Uncle,” Obito croaks. Kakashi raises the bed for him, so that he can at least look at Madara with some dignity. Madara shoves the cup of ice chips across the bedside table until it’s within his reach. 

“You are determined to send me to an early grave, it seems,” Madara says, after a long moment watching Obito blink stupidly at him. “Did I not tell you that I never wanted to see you unconscious in a hospital bed again?” 

“Yeah, see,” Obito clears his throat, a poor imitation of his usual grin spreading across his still swollen face. “I tried to tell the Kiri guys that, you know, but they weren’t really in the mood to listen to me at the time.” Madara snorts, seemingly against his will, and puts his phone back in his jacket pocket. 

“Yagura will regret this, I’m sure,” he says, dusting off his knees and rising to his feet. “You will be moved to a safe house as soon as you are able to be discharged. Dr. Senju assures me that will be within the week.” He spares a glance at Rin’s bed, where she’s still out cold, hooked to a million monitors that Kakashi hardly understands. “I have retained Dr. Katou’s services to check in on you there and see to your continued medical care.” There is a long pause, before he continues, like it’s an afterthought, as he exits the room. “Mikoto will also procure a wardrobe for her and have it waiting there. The clothing Namikaze brought from her house is, quite frankly, atrociously frumpy.” It is likely as close as permission as they’ll get from him- the fact that he’s allowing her space in the safe house is nothing short of miraculous, let alone allowing her in a safe house with them for their recuperation. When Madara leaves the room, Kakashi and Obito heave sigh in unison, the beeping of Obito’s heart monitor going down noticeably. 

“Shit, dude,” Obito rasps, flopping a hand across the bed to reach for him, a point of contact, a grounding island. 

“Have I told you I fucking hate your family, lately,” Kakashi grunts, leaning into his hand and closing his eyes. He can feel a migraine coming on intensely fast. Obito just laughs, squeezing his fingers tightly. 

“Sorry about the monster-in-law,” he says, scrabbling with his other arm to get an ice chip and pop it into his mouth. “But there are perks, right?” 

“Perks I’m medically banned from accessing right now,” Kakashi deadpans, shooting a glance at Obito’s lap like he’d ever consider going against Tsunade’s orders with Shizune or the Godmother herself potentially lurking around the corner. 

* * *

Watching Kakashi look at Rin makes Obito’s heart ache. She’s sleeping on the big bed in the master suite of the safehouse, wrapped up in approximately five blankets (she’s complained of being cold ever since they got home from the hospital, which Shizune says is normal and will probably go away soon.) Kakashi sits beside her, propped up against the headboard with his book in one hand and his other tangled so deep in her hair Obito’s not sure it will ever get free. His thumb drags softly across the curve of Rin’s cheek, where it’s soft pink and sun-sweet. Even though he probably wouldn’t admit it, Obito knows he hasn’t turned a page in half an hour, caught up with his eyes focused on the rise and fall of Rin’s chest, the gentle clutch of her hand on the pillow, the tip of her nose, the line of her mouth. Her eyelashes look like soot smeared across her cheek, freckles like constellations he would happily trace with his lips for the rest of his life. Kakashi drags his eyes back and forth along porcelain-smooth curves like the touch of a lover gathering cherry blossom petals in the springtime, like the crush of dawn bleeding across a summer sky, like the fullness of the harvest sitting warm in the fields. 

They still haven’t talked about it- what Kakashi said that night. Obito’s not even sure Rin remembers. He probably wouldn’t, doesn’t really recall what Kakashi said to him when he was bleeding out at fifteen and certain that the other boy’s mismatched eyes would be the last thing he ever saw, strangely okay with that and ready to float on. Kakashi would likely have denied saying anything, back then. Obito is certain that if he startles the other man now, he’ll deny looking at Rin that way too. But it’s not an unfamiliar expression on Kakashi’s face, not really. He remembers it, flooding Kakashi’s face like a sudden flare of light, a bonfire set ablaze on a deserted beach, when they were younger. 

(“I think I’d like to get lost with you,” Obito says, tracing a finger down the edge of Kakashi’s scar, watching the other boy roll his eyes in the dimness of Kakashi’s bedroom, splayed out silver and lightning underneath the strawberry moon. 

“Sap,” Kakashi accuses, but he allows Obito’s slightly sloppy kiss nonetheless, letting him press closer, slotting their hips together in a slow, lazy roll. He can’t get enough of the soft noise Obito makes when Kakashi lets his canines catch on the other boy’s lower lip, dragging them down to his throat and sucking a violet star there, a mark of the jealous ownership Obito feels deep in his chest. 

“Come on, Kashi,” Obito coaxes, voice lower than Kakashi thinks should be possible, looking at him with hungry eyes. He kisses him again, again, again. “Get lost with me, hmm?” And there it was, so soft, dawn and dusk and heartbreaking intimacy played out across the sharp lines of Kakashi’s face- like Kakashi wanted so desperately to say yes to him, to reach out and find someone reaching back. Obito, ever greedy, took it for the affirmation he knew it was and kissed him into the mattress until his jaw hurt, the sweetest ache he’d ever felt.)

There are a million and one things Obito would like to say to Rin, on their behalf-  _ I’m sorry, we shouldn’t have been so careless, you deserve better, you reckless idiot, you took a  _ **_bullet_ ** _ for us, we  _ **_love_ ** _ you _ \- but none of them are available to him in the moment. He doesn’t even feel the usual smug aura he usually enjoys after being right about something (he was right, of course, that Kakashi could and would fall in love with Rin just as he had) because it took a life-threatening gunshot wound for Kakashi to admit it. Still, there’s something to be said for the possible future it presents. 

If Rin isn’t absolutely scared away by them by now, it’s likely she won’t ever be. She hadn’t panicked as soon as she woke up, demanded to be set free from the families, or resigned from her job effective immediately. Obito knows that he and Kakashi are… a lot, even without the unsavory aspects of their careers, or the weight their family names carry. They are fiercely possessive, unapologetically vicious, and territorial to a fault. Obito watched people slip away from him his whole childhood, until Kakashi came along and anchored him there. His parents, gone before he even knew their faces. His baa-chan, fading away from an illness that no one would name. Indra-jiji and Ashura, who used to bring him sweets and let him sit on their laps and remind him patiently, archaically, that Uchiha men don’t cry- before Obito remembers Izuna gently telling him that they were never coming back. Kakashi had nothing of his mother but her pale, elegant, piano-playing fingers and her spidery eyelashes, watched his father die on the hardwood of his childhood home, felt the entire city turn its back on him. 

When men like them find a precious thing like Rin, it is in their avaricious nature to hold it close to their chests and never, ever let it go. He and Kakashi were raised in funeral clothes, and that makes them a poor choice for wedding finery, doesn’t it? He knows the cloying scent of the lilies Konoha lays at the old graveyard more so than he has ever known the delicate fragrance of banda orchids or roses on a chapel altar. But, like Kakashi said months ago- it’s not as though Rin is without blood on her hands. She killed for them, bled for them, very nearly  _ died  _ for them. He keeps thinking of the terrified look on her face when she scrambled towards him in that warehouse, the determination in her movements when she stabbed the Kiri enforcer. All of a sudden, when Obito closes his eyes, he can only see the blood dripping from her hands and he has to be closer to them, whether he startles Kakashi out of his reverie or not. He stumbles forward without a thought, clambers up on the immense mattress with stiff movements, careful not to jostle his wounds or tumble onto Rin. Here is where they fit as perfectly as he had imagined, sinking into the mattress like parentheses, ripples, vines curling together. He throws one arm over Kakashi’s legs, leaning up against his hip and letting his other hand join Kakashi’s on Rin’s face. 

* * *

Rin doesn’t remember ever aching more than in the weeks of her recovery in the safe house with Obito and Kakashi. The first time she walks all the way around the yard without help feels like an immense victory, her stomach muscles protesting viciously at first and finally allowing her some freedom of movement in the growing summer heat. And the ache is not just in her healing muscles, or frustrated lungs- it sinks into her heart, the longer she spends napping practically on top of Obito in the huge master bed, or allowing herself to indulge in Kakashi’s hesitant proximity out on the couch, the way their legs tangled together. She heals more slowly than they do, until Kakashi is perfectly fine and Obito is mostly so, and she is trailing behind them with a raw pink scar on her stomach that burns sometimes at night. She spends a lot of time thinking  _ I love them _ when they’re not looking at her, just in case they might be able to read her mind. 

“You don’t have to stay here with me all the time, or- you know. Don’t feel like you have to, at least. Don’t you have work to do?” she asks them, the second week they’re in the house with her. 

“Never more important work than you,” Obito grins, heartbreaking and full. 

She doesn’t ask that question again. 

Living there with them, though, is so perfect it nearly kills her. While the reality of living in a Hidden Family safe house should be terrifying, it is easier than breathing to fall into the routine of it all. Kakashi often cooks for them, as he’s doing now, and she can’t help the restless energy in her that wants to be near to him, to see what he’s doing. They haven’t really talked about what he said, and she’s not entirely sure he did say it (who trusts the memory of a dying woman?) and she’s too cowardly to break this crystalline dream by bringing it up. She messes about at the stove when Kakashi turns to grab things from the cabinet, stirring at the curry he has simmering away. It’s one of her favorites. She’s not sure when he learned how to cook, or where, but god bless whoever had the patience to teach him because she and Obito are most certainly reaping the benefits right now. Even if he keeps telling them not to take it for granted, that he’ll eventually give in to the laziness and stop spoiling them with his home cooked meals.

That’s one of the interesting things about Kakashi- despite his love of dogs, he really is more like a cat than anything else. She often finds him lying in a convenient puddle of sunshine reading his books, or lazily draped across Obito on the couch. For two people so obviously in love, they seem to share space like mercurial magnets, polarizing on and off. Sometimes they cannot be separated, and others they dance and poke and tease at one another like opposite poles, a perfect orbit. Rin dips a finger into the sauce and tastes it, marveling at the strange universe she has invaded between the two of them, north and south, sun and moon. The smell of basmati rice fills the room, mingling with the curry- she closes her eyes to breathe in the heavenly air, and that’s how Kakashi manages to catch her off guard, slipping his hands gently around her waist and tugging her back from the stove with the utmost care. 

“You’re very good at getting underfoot,” he murmurs against the top of her head, enveloping her entirely in his presence, and Rin just laughs through the butterflies swarming in her throat, her stomach grumbling under his hands. It’s difficult not to hold on to these moments with greed, the avaricious nature of her heart unfettered now that she’s tasted loss. How can she let go of something she wants so badly, especially when it’s right there in front of her? 

“Is it ready yet?” she asks him, tongue-in-cheek, poking back at him and trying to keep her heart in check even as it races away from her. And then- she shrieks, because he’s managed to scoop her up in his arms with very little effort at all, laugh shaking through his chest annd into hers. 

“You and Obito are the damn same,” Kakashi tells her, his arm under her knees and his breath fanning across her face. Her stomach hurts just a little, but it’s nothing compared to the knot in her throat and the intense, sudden affection she feels for him even as he carries her out to the living room and deposits her over the back of the couch and directly into Obito’s waiting arms. “I’ll  _ tell  _ you when it’s ready,” he says sternly, stalking back towards the other room. 

“Yo,” Obito says brightly, with his grin nearly pressed to her cheek as his arms wind around her. “Kakashi doesn’t trust you to stay out of the kitchen, hmm?” He adjusts her a little on his lap, one long scarred finger playing with the ends of her hairs, and settles back into the couch again, kindly ignoring the pink flushing across her face. “He gets like that when he’s perfecting a recipe. One time, he actually tied me to the bed to keep me out of there.” 

“And you deserved it,” Kakashi calls from the kitchen. “Bastard.”

“Maa, he’s so cruel to me,” Obito whines in a mocking imitation of his boyfriend, smiling up at her and winking when Kakashi audibly scoffs. His finger curls around a strand of her hair, following it back up towards her cheek as he tucks it behind her ear, and she shivers slightly, leaning into his warmth like a comet orbiting a sun. “Hey,” he says, after a moment, low and warm and intimate in the space between them when she can’t seem to tear her eyes away from his face. His fingertips on her skin are rosin on the bow, dragging tension from her strings until a thrumming symphony builds between them. “You okay? He didn’t jostle you too much, did he?”

“No,” she says, unexpectedly breathless. “No, I’m- I’m fine-” 

“Yeah,” Obito drawls, his smile curling up even further as his gravity drags her down against him. “You are.” His palm presses hot against her cheek, sliding down her jaw and cupping her face, thumb rubbing a warm line across the curve of her cheekbone, just under her eye where the lilac moons of overwork have finally faded away. He watches her with his whirlpool eye until they are breaths away, his nose brushing against hers and her pulse hammering away underneath his palm. “Hey,” he says again, close enough that she can feel the movement of his lips, and that’s when she realizes that they’re about to  _ kiss  _ with Kakashi fifteen feet away  _ making them dinner _ -

“What?” She pushes back from him, scrambling a little for purchase on his lap as she tries to get her legs under her, and he rights her without a complaint, letting her get her knees beneath her on the soft couch cushions even though it puts her in the awkward angle of straddling his thighs, before he grabs her hands gently and pulls her closer once more, even as she weakly protests. 

“It’s  _ okay _ ,” he reassures her, voice thick with ardency, rubbing his thumbs across the backs of her palms, and oh, she’s  _ panicking _ . She knows, with absolute certainty, that she has ruined this- ruined everything, all at once. 

“It’s not,” she gasps, still unable to make herself move farther, “your boyfriend is- Kakashi is-”

“Right here,” his smooth voice comes from behind her, his hands sliding across her shoulders and down her arms to meet Obito’s, encasing her fingers between theirs. He is a wall, a titan behind her with Obito the ocean before, a tableau of crashing waves waiting to drown her alive. She cannot back away from the shore any more than she can resist the pull of the water and the warmth of Kakashi’s chest once more at her back, pushing her into the depths. 

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…” Shouldn’t have what? Almost kissed Obito? Tangled herself so deeply within them that to tear her out would have destroyed her entirely? Fallen for them so completely that her ribs feel like they are crumbling, shattering, eroding into the sea when she thinks about going home to her empty townhouse and leaving this behind? But it’s too late for that, isn’t it, because she desperately wants to know what Obito’s mouth feels like on hers, what Kakashi’s eyes look like when he is incoherent with passion. She wants to hear what they said to her when she was bleeding on that dock and know, this time, that it’s not an illusion borne of hypovolemic shock. More so than any of what she wants from them in bed, she wants this- the weight of their hands twined together and the promise of laughter over dinner, the knowledge that tomorrow she will wake up and they will still be here and she will still  _ love  _ them. 

It’s true that her life has gotten more dangerous since they entered it, crashed into it without a care in the world for what wreckage they left behind (the wreckage of false normalcy, the facade of ordinary) but that could never outweigh the richness of their presence. She has laughed more and cried less in the past six months than ever before in her life. There is purpose to her work, there has  _ always  _ been purpose to her work, but when has she felt passion like this before? When has she so looked forward to hearing Obito tell a crummy joke, or watching him tear up over a sappy made for TV romance movie while she bandages a laceration on his shin? When had the hunger for the intimacy of her banter with Kakashi taken over her, so that she wanted it every evening, felt incomplete without it? Rin has always been a whole woman- a whole person, a whole set of dreams and goals and thoughts and loves. She wasn’t missing anything before Kakashi and Obito, but her eyes have been opened to how  _ happy  _ someone else can make her and now she thinks she can’t ever go back. If what they said on the dock wasn’t true, if it was a hallucination, if she imagined the tension between them- how could she? How could she ever go back?

She can’t breathe.

“It’s okay,” Kakashi echoes his boyfriend, his lips against her temple and his body caging her against Obito, like he knows exactly what she’s thinking. She can’t believe that when they first met, she thought he was cold, aloof, untouchable, orbiting solely around Obito and unwilling to change. “Don’t you remember what I said? He loves you, Rin.” Kakashi kisses his way softly, achingly gently down the side of her face until she is shuddering, sucking in air again, brought back to life. “ _ I _ love you, Rin.” 

“Oh,” she says, even as Obito reaches out for her jaw again and drags her closer to his mouth. His fingers are reverent and his breath is the coming of spring, warming her winter bones when he kisses her for the first time. Kakashi makes a deeply pleased rumbling noise behind the two of them, holding her tightly with elegant hands. “Oh,” she breathes, and the both of them laugh. 

“We’re never gonna let you go,” Obito murmurs against her mouth when she kisses him again, this time her own power pushing her forward, shoves him against the back of the couch and grabs at him with the most pressing lust she’s felt in her life. It is an answer to the conflict within her, a ceasefire, a treaty she will sign with urgency and never allow to break. 

“You’d better not,” she says fiercely, reaching behind her to yank Kakashi fully into her back, and for the first time since the warehouse she feels completely safe. If Kakashi is the shore, and Obito the ocean, Rin will be the tides between them, pushing and pulling back and forth in an endless show of their love. 

“It’s just us,” Kakashi murmurs, dragging teeth across her neck. “If you’ll have us, if you want us, you can stay with us forever-”

“I want it,” Rin practically sobs, giving in to the things she has been thinking about for months, feeling  _ guilty  _ for wanting. All this time, they had wanted her back, their flirtation had  _ never  _ been as empty as she assumed and now, at this flash point where they all combust together, she gets to have everything she dreamed of in this little world between their bodies. 

“Oh thank  _ fuck _ ,” Obito laughs breathlessly, kissing her a hundred, a thousand, a million times over every inch of her face. It is entirely, completely perfect, as Kakashi drags them off the couch and pushes them towards the bedroom and tells them he’ll be  _ right there he just has to turn off the stove _ \- Obito carries her all the way to the bed, strong arms up under her thighs and mouth writing love poems down her neck. He bites and sucks at the hollow of her collarbone and she moans shamelessly, tugging at his hair and startling a deep sound from the back of his throat. All of a sudden, she can  _ feel  _ herself getting wet, breath stolen and hot pangs of arousal twisting in her gut. Every scrape of his teeth, each soft word of affection falling from his lips like cherry blossoms on the still pond of her skin; it is electricity running through her veins and taking her breath away. 

“You-  _ nnn _ , ah, I-” she stutters out, trying to writhe against his broad chest without making her stomach muscles twinge uncomfortably, and he grins with sharp teeth still pressed into her skin. For a brief moment, standing before the mattress, he presses her close enough that the grind of her hips brings a short, sharp burst of pleasure, and then he lays her down with all the appreciation of an artist surveying his canvas, brush in hand. 

“This,” she tries again, reaching out for his hair and sliding careful, trembling fingers through it. It’s soft, so soft, falling over his eye endearingly when he melts into her touch. “It’s not too fast?” 

“Too fast?” Kakashi scoffs from the doorway. He’s already throwing his shirt off into the corner of the room. “By all means, let us know if you want to stop, but as far as we’re concerned we could have been doing this  _ months  _ ago.” 

“Months?” Rin says rather faintly, near hysterically for a second, as Obito crawls onto the bed and coaxes her up towards the headboard. “I mean, yes, good, we should keep going definitely, not too fast for me if it’s not too fast for you, but-  _ months _ ?”

“I cannot possibly express to you how much he has talked about wanting to do this during those  _ months _ ,” Obito murmurs, lips pressed to her throat as he spreads her legs carefully across his and supports her tender stomach. His scarred hand cups her side so gently, pulling her until her hips tilt up, and Kakashi can lay between soft thighs with hungry eyes watching her every breath. Obito’s other hand slides down her stomach, tracing the edges of her new scars, past pink skin and over her brown curls until he can slip his fingers through her wetness and spread her lips to the cool air of the bedroom. She whines a little at that, taken by the soft touch and the way Kakashi sucks in a quick breath, like he’s overcome by the sight of them together. “He talks way too fucking much about wanting to eat you out over your desk at the clinic, see how many times he can make you come before you fall over, trembling, and he can fuck you there on the rug.” She shakes with a bolt of arousal, fingernails digging into the back of Obito’s neck, and he groans appreciatively even as Kakashi glares playfully up at him. 

“You’re insufferable,” Kakashi informs him, even as he ducks forward and kisses her quickly before bending back down and fitting his lips perfectly across her clit. They both seem to shake with her when she moans, high and tight, hips jerking into Kakashi’s mouth. 

“Me? Never,” Obito licks across her shoulder, biting hickies into her skin and pinching at her nipples with his free hand. Kakashi slides a thumb through her slick, pressing her open for him, and Obito takes the opportunity to slip his own fingers down and into her, a quick one-two press and curl that has her arching and gritting out a desperate whimper. Kakashi licks around his boyfriend-  _ their  _ boyfriend’s fingers, laving over her clit and sending shockwaves through her whole body. She tenses, squirms, writhes within the confines of Obito’s allowance, just enough so that she can feel everything they’re doing fully but not enough to wear on her newly healed abdomen. 

“Good boy,” Obito drawls, tangling fingers in Kakashi’s hair and pulling him closer to them, practically rubbing his face across her wetness. He takes the direction hungrily, a deep and desiring noise rasping in his throat, muffled by his attention to her. She’s not sure how she imagined this before, really, whether she thought Obito would take charge or Kakashi, or how they might switch roles- but Obito’s inability to stop talking and seeming glee at how his words affect them is certainly fitting. 

“Ah, ah- ahhh, fuck, hnn-” she tries, briefly, to form words around the burning rush tingling through her entire body, luxuriating in the out of control feeling of Obito’s fingers rubbing up against that perfect overwhelming spot as they curl in and out of her, but settles for a weak, “Kashi,  _ Kashi _ , ah- Obito-” as she squirms, feeling Obito push his erection against her lower back. 

“He’s pretty like this,” Obito murmurs, pleased and secret, smug and princely in his victory, “but he’ll be even prettier when you spread him open for my cock, Rin-” Oh, fuck, the image of Kakashi, who is so often stoic and unruffled, completely messed up between them is  _ too much _ . She comes, sobbing and harder than she can ever remember, undone by the intensity of their passion for her and the tangled knot of pleasure that finally unties itself and breaks, flooding her with warmth until she’s panting and twisting away from their ministrations. 

Time gets away from her a little. 

Rin registers that they lay her back on the bed, and she kisses them happily, sloppily, a little blearily in thanks, and then Obito tackles Kakashi back onto the bed and makes good on his desire to practically eat the other man alive. When she’s coherent enough and her limbs don’t feel so much like jelly, she can roll over and join him in biting marks all across Kakashi’s pale skin, reminders of their ownership, so shiny and new. It feels brilliant to see them and know her mouth put them there, made him bruise pink and tomorrow purple, completely taken by the two of them. His hands, long elegant hands, are perfectly fitted to tangling in her hair as he gasps for them, breathless thanks for their return of his passions. Obito grabs lube for both of them from the bedside table when Kakashi finally whines and twists his hips under him, pleading with his body for something more. She helps him roll over, unsteady legs and dripping cock absolutely enticing, before Obito gestures for her hand and drizzles cool lubricant all over it with a smug smirk.

“You’re gonna be nice for her, aren’t you?” Obito croons to their boyfriend (what a thrill that is), shit-eating grin firmly affixed on his handsome face. One hand presses gently to the small of Kakashi’s back, holding him to the mattress with inexorable strength. She can see every bite mark he left on pale skin, red marks leading up inner thighs that tremble just slightly when Obito yanks on Kakashi’s hair and his hips jerk into the mattress. It’s not like she’s never fingered a guy before, but there’s something to the fact that Obito is willing to spread Kakashi out on the mattress and keep him there that feels… special, in a way. Kakashi, who Rin knows has definitely shot a man before, who looks like a coiled up panther waiting to spring at any moment, who sharpens knives at her kitchen table like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Kakashi, who felt like caged lightning against her back when she kissed Obito earlier up against the couch and he grabbed her with hungry, desperate hands. 

“Fuck you,” Kakashi says, slightly muffled by the mattress, so she grins and slides cold lube-slicked fingers up the underside of his sac and watches him shiver and shake at the touch. The hope is that by the end of the night, he doesn’t have any sharp words left for either of them. Her hands look sort of ridiculously miniscule on his muscled thigh, but they’ll do the trick- she knows how to push his legs a little wider, let him arch back up and open, like they’ve done this before. It’s comfortable, despite their inexperience with one another, probably borne on the easiness of Obito and Kakashi’s continued existence as two people fully submerged in one another for so, so long. 

“I think,” Rin murmurs, suddenly bold as she presses her slick thumb to the edge of Kakashi’s hole and watches him push back into her, “that you’re the one getting fucked, tonight.” He can’t find the words to retort, either, because she’s sliding finger in as far as she can and not stopping, not giving him the moment of comfort, because he doesn’t really deserve that from her when he’s been such a  _ brat _ . And she’s not too worried, either, since she’s pretty certain Obito does this on a regular basis. Speaking of Obito, who’s red in the face like he drank a case of wine all by himself, watching her with predatory eyes- she leans up, beckons him closer with her other hand, and kisses him sloppy for a minute or two, just until Kakashi is making impatient noises and bucking up against them. 

“Hmm,” Obito hums into her mouth, settling back and getting his free hand under Kakashi’s neck and just holding him there, arched back nicely for them and unable to move, spread tightly wound and oh-so-pretty. “Impolite, Kashi.” 

“I would be more polite,” Kakashi whines, a little breathlessly. “If you- ah, fuck,  _ fuck- _ ” She shoves another finger in, crooking them like she’s a fucking heat seeking missile, because she knows exactly what she’s looking for and she hits it on the first try and then- he’s bucking and swearing beneath them in the most  _ compelling _ way. “Okay, sure, okay,” Kakashi gasps, a flush of red blooming down his back like ink in water. Rin keeps dragging her fingers over that singular spot, just enjoying the way it makes Kakashi whine and squirm, the way Obito curls his fingers tighter and  _ squeezes _ Kakashi’s throat, the way she feels flush with power over him, only him. 

“If I’d’ve known you wanted to get fucked by us both  _ this  _ badly I would’ve made you beg for it sooner,” Obito murmurs against Kakashi’s ear, his mouth bruising pale skin, Kakashi’s cheek going hot cherry fire as he snarls at Obito with bared teeth. Like he hasn’t expressed the same desire, like Kakashi hasn’t been talking about this for months now-

“W-will you shut- ah, aah- up?” Kakashi snaps unsteadily, pushing back as much as he can against Rin and shutting his eyes when the feeling overwhelms him entirely. Twisting back, looking at them both with a hazy expression, he jerks his head and spreads his thighs even wider around her. “ _ Please _ fuck me,” he begs, so delightful, so desperate, and she has to say yes to him. It’s easy work to switch spots with Obito, let the other man press into him while she watches, dark and hungry. Kakashi whimpers high, broken and whining, his back bowing as he fights Rin’s hand on his throat like he has to bite into the covers or risk shaking apart entirely in that moment. 

“Those noises are for us,” Obito growls, pulling him into an even tighter arc, squeezing him until he chokes on his own desire and moans for them so sugar sweet, honey and silver in the shadows of the bedroom. “Come on, pretty boy, don’t hide them-”

“Yes, _yes_ , yes,” Kakashi gasps. “They are, for you, nnn,  _ fuck- _ ” He’s incoherent, babbling as Obito fucks back into him and watches him grasp at the covers like they might ground him, even when Obito grinds over his prostate and lightning zips across his skin. It’s a miracle how quickly he melts, when he’s so often biting words and sharp edges outside the bedroom. She wouldn’t have imagined it, she doesn’t think, not like this. What else could it be, though? He shakes, trembles, and Rin is unmade by it all. 

The best part, perhaps, is the fact that even there next to Kakashi and Obito, who have been in love for  _ years _ , she doesn’t feel left out. She slides down onto her back and coaxes Kakashi’s mouth to hers, kissing him deeper and deeper until she can swallow the noises Obito wrings from his body. Every worry she had about being auxiliary, unneeded, intrusive is assuaged by the weight of Kakashi’s hands, helplessly grasping for her and holding her tightly to his strung-out body. Obito grins at the two of them like he’s gone completely feral, bending past Kakashi’s sweat-slick shoulder to kiss their boyfriend’s taste right out of her mouth. And, despite the fact that they’d just brought her to a mind-shaking orgasm, she finds herself wanting again in a powerful way, rubbing her thighs together and grabbing back against their possessive hands. 

“I’m gonna watch you fuck him, one of these days,” Obito gasps out, pulling Kakashi’s hips back against himself with impressive strength. “You’d look so good, all strapped up, making him beg for you.” Rin moans deep in her chest at the image even as Kakashi chokes on his own arousal and whines, shuddering and rasping out a warning. 

“Come here, come here, honey,” Rin murmurs, breath short and hands demanding. She pulls Kakashi further over her, letting him bury his red face in her throat and bite at her skin as he pushes helplessly back on Obito’s thrusts and trembles towards his orgasm. He kisses her jaw so sweetly when he comes, open mouthed whining and sloppy lips praying to her altar as he spills hot over her stomach. It should be gross (it’s a little gross) but it’s also exceedingly gratifying. She can feel Obito shake above them too, and fucking in mercilessly as he comes, over-stimulating Kakashi to the point of squirming, nearly silent whimpers. 

“Enough, enough,” their silver haired boyfriend (oh, the novelty of being  _ theirs _ ) finally slurs, letting the two of them maneuver him into collapsing to the side. If Rin had thought she saw him lazy before, it’s nothing compared to the fucked out dazed puddle of a man he is now, and it’s completely satisfying to witness. She’s so engrossed in the cherry pink of his cheeks and the starlight fall of his hair that she almost doesn’t notice Obito bending over her until his lips are on her stomach, tickling and faint. 

“One more?” He asks, like she isn’t obviously wet-hot again, and he keeps his eyes on her as he dips down to lick a stripe of come off her stomach. “We look good on you, you know.”

“Ew, you-“ she stutters out, giggling, face blooming even redder because she’s turned on by the image of him like this despite herself, but he just laughs and does it again, sliding his hands between her legs to slip inside her once more. Rin gasps out something incoherent, arching into the feeling of his thumb on her clit, and lets him kiss her with his filthy mouth anyways. His broad shoulders over her are a mountain range, his smile a horizon, and she takes the brightness of his mouth against hers like a field begging for sunshine.

“Let us keep you,” he beseeches her, turning her over and over with his hands. “We love you, we love you-“ and she loves them back. He fits three fingers inside her and drags a second orgasm from her bones, pulling it out of her longer and longer. At some point, Kakashi regains control of his limbs and joins Obito in kissing her messily. They make up for lost time with whispered adorations falling between their mouths until she finally clenches tight around Obito’s clever hand and comes, honey and salt and magma. 

“Oh, you are so _ lovely _ ,” Kakashi murmurs, dragging a thumb through the faintly overwhelmed tear tracks on her cheeks. Obito hums in agreement, intent upon curling around her until the three of them can be separated no longer, grown together like climbing roses turning pink in the morning dawn. And she sighs, sinking through the mattress, a river rock content to let their currents slip gently over her. 

“I love you,” Rin whispers back.

This time, they hear her loud and clear. 


	6. August, September

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything settles into place. Snapshots of a revenge built by happiness, held ardently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all.... are simply the sweetest possible readers. I'm gonna try and respond to everyone's comments but thank you all so much!!! 
> 
> Also, to be forewarned- much of this chapter and the epilogue is just smut... which is really the whole reason I wrote this AU in the first place. There will be more of it!

The idyll of the safe house remains, for some time, unpunctuated by pressing matters (like who exactly authorized the men that took them, and whether Yagura will pay for his trespasses.) At some point, Hashirama and Madara let them run errands, or leave the house briefly for things. Kakashi, of course, takes this to mean that he and Obito can go visit Minato and Kushina as long as someone else is watching Rin at the house. What he had not anticipated was the fact that his parents (and they are, aren’t they) hadn’t had the opportunity to tease him about a lover in quite some time. It should have been expected, after all- Kushina used to take great delight in poking at him, when he was insufferably pining over Obito. 

“So when are you bringing her over for dinner,” Kushina asks during lunch one day, looking highly amused at the way Kakashi chokes on his water. Minato pounds him on the back without even looking up from his emails, scrolling through yet another set of things Mito wants him to oversee this weekend. Naruto doesn’t pay any attention to any of them, too busy slurping up ramen and making a scene with his dinosaur nuggets. 

“What?” he croaks out, glaring Obito’s way. Obito simply crosses his arms behind his head and lounges back on the armchair, unwilling to help him out in any way. 

“ _ Rin _ ,” Kushina says, like it’s obvious. “When are you bringing her for dinner?” 

“Why would we-” Kakashi gets halfway through the question, a classic attempt at misdirection, before Kushina rolls her eyes and throws an entire tangerine at him from the fruit bowl on the coffee table. 

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she groans, grinning. “I’m not stupid, and as much as Minato wants to pretend you two are chaste little angels, I’m pretty sure Obito rarely wears the lipstick that’s staining your collar, Kashi. It’s not his color.” Minato hisses, looking up from his phone with a devastated expression that suggests he does, in fact, kind of want to pretend they’re still chaste little angels. Like he hadn’t caught Kakashi blowing Obito in his childhood bedroom more than once, their senior year of high school, and like he hadn’t been the one to buy Kakashi a massive package of condoms and beg him to do his own fucking laundry, if he was going to be having sex on that bed. Like he wasn’t aware that Obito had blown up at Madara for Rin’s sake. Like Rin wasn’t waiting for them at home, having tea with Shizune. 

“She’s still healing,” Kakashi says weakly. Even Minato rolls his eyes at that one- he taught Kakashi to lie better than that. “And… Yagura still. Isn’t dealt with?” he tries. Kushina just sighs. 

“He will be,” she says, eyes hardening into a flinty sapphire, jaw tight and locked. “And when he is, we’ll be  _ celebrating _ .” 

* * *

They don’t have to wait all that long to celebrate, it turns out.

* * *

“I thought you didn’t like her,” Izuna points out as Madara finishes up the missive to their men, ordering them to direct all intelligence on Yagura of Kiri to the top of the Family. He’s a kill on sight, now.

“Who?” Madara asks, through his mouthful of whiskey. He wipes his top lip with a handkerchief (god, his older brother is such a stiff, uptight-) and glances at Izuna with distracted eyes. 

“Rin,” Izuna says, tapping idly at the desktop. “But you’re going this far, huh?”

“I don’t… you know what,” Madara snaps, signing the end of the paper with a flourish. “I’m not justifying myself to you.” 

“I think you’re  _ impressed _ by her little play with the knife,” Izuna sings, snagging the paper and moving to pass it on to the guard standing outside their office. 

“Obito is…  _ fond _ of her,” Madara says stiffly. “I am simply protecting my ward’s best interests.” 

“Hmm,” Izuna hums, grinning smugly at his older brother as he opens the office door. “You’re getting soft, aniki.” 

The stapler Madara throws gives a solid, solid thunk as it makes contact with the door where Izuna’s head had been just a moment before. 

* * *

“They should have found him by now,” Jiraiya mentions casually, leaning back against the brick of the bar next to Minato. Minato just looks past him, never taking eyes off their target. His student is quick, ruthless, smooth- completely unruffled by it. He’d been calm even when Jiraiya informed him that Tsunade said the boys had been taken, along with Rin, from the clinic. Steel eyes, smooth jaw, heartbreaking smile, strong voice. “Even Madara hasn’t been able to track Yagura down.” 

“We’ll hear from him,” Minato says, crossing his arms and leaning back as well. “I went a step further than Madara did.” When Jiraiya looks at him in question, he just smiles wider and leans back even more. It’s objectively scary, like watching a snake contemplate whether or not to eat you now or save you for an agony of laters. “A lot of people are fond of Rin, Sensei. You should know that, by now.” 

“What did you  _ do _ ,” Jiraiya groans, massaging his temples under his usual headband. 

“Did you know that Rin is actually very good at treating poisonings? Baki of the Iron Sand was quite grateful for her expertise, a few months ago.” Minato laughs warmly, the most terrifying sound of all. 

“Oh, we’ll hear from Yagura, then,” Jiraiya mutters, turning back towards their target. It’s time to make a move. 

Or rather, Yagura will be lucky if he ever hears anything again. 

* * *

It took a good while to convince everyone (Tsunade, Shizune, the boys-) that she was well enough to be allowed out for coffee, provided that she takes someone with her. But Rin’s been so bored, reading and re-reading cases on her work laptop and sending in guidance whenever she can. She can read all her books, and join the boys in playing video games, and pretend she doesn’t notice that more and more often, one of them will leave for a few hours and come back looking grim. It’s a little stifling, for someone who’s so used to doing things for herself. 

“You know it’s only because you’re so precious to us,” Obito murmurs to her sweetly, kissing her forehead before he and Kakashi leave her with Itachi and Shisui for an evening. 

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbles, barely pacified and only willing to accept it because it’s true, for one, and she’ll get to spend time with Itachi bitching about the various meddling Uchiha that always seem to be up in their business. Itachi’s very quiet and respectful until there’s no one around from the family but Shisui to hear him speak, and then Rin gets to experience his beautifully dry wit for herself as well. They do consider her precious. Or, if not precious, exactly- at least Madara recognizes that she’s too valuable for many reasons to simply let go. It was an insult of the highest order to go after her, because while Obito and Kakashi have their hands deep in dirty Hidden Family business, there is an unspoken rule about medics in wartime. It’s deeply disrespectful to go after someone’s girlfriend and it’s even more disrespectful to go after a doctor. 

Finally, though, Rin gets Tenzo to take her to a coffee shop right around the corner from the safe house while Kakashi and Obito are meeting Minato for lunch. She’s itching for a chai latte that isn’t just chai concentrate that Obito tried very hard to aerate on the stove for her. ( _ I watched a youtube video about it _ , he’d told her, beaming like he’d won the lottery.) Also, they’re out of soy milk, because Kakashi keeps using all of it in his midnight cereal bowls when he can’t sleep. She really loves them, she does, but she’s not built to be a bird in a cage, however gilded it may be. Tenzo buys her a tea, and puts her in the back booth, and she has a moment to finally  _ relax _ , even if Tenzo is looking kind of antsy. Things are remarkably calm here- calm enough that she finally tells Tenzo to stop looking like a child that has to pee on the bus, and just go to the damn bathroom already. 

“Are you sure-” he asks, but she nods, and waves him away. 

It’s in the brief moment that he leaves her alone that she breathes in the smell of ground coffee, the sounds of the neighborhood, the shuffle of papers in the booth behind her. She wants to go back to the office soon, although Tsunade may not let her. For now, at least, she’s able to do telehealth appointments and consulting from home. But she misses her townhouse, and her Danskos, and her morning tea at the clinic. She misses her office, and her own wardrobe (not that the things Mikoto bought her weren’t lovely.) She misses her old life, and the way Obito and Kakashi fit into it, until she also misses that someone’s sliding into the booth across from her. 

“Ah, that seat’s taken,” she starts to say politely, before the other woman cuts her off. She’s brilliantly beautiful, with long auburn hair and emerald eyes and an extremely well tailored navy suit on. 

“So,” the woman says, without introduction, leveling stunning green eyes on Rin with laser focus. “You’re the doctor that Yagura was so upset with.” And Rin goes cold, glancing around the coffee shop as nonchalantly as she can. God, of all the times for Tenzo to need a bathroom break. Of all the times for Rin to insist that she’d be  _ fine _ , no one can see her here in the back booth. The gentle clinking of silverware against coffee cups is a steadily building cacophony in her ears, echoing through her skull as the other woman stares her down. She’s been so  _ careful _ . But, like Tsunade says- it only takes one mistake. 

“I’m sorry,” Rin demurs, fiddling with the kubaton that Obito attached to her keyring under the table. She knows full well who Yagura is, but- “I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’re speaking about. I’m not familiar with that name.” 

“No,” the woman leans back in the booth, crossing her arms and smiling. Her mouth is alluring the way the edge of a well sharpened blade can be, glinting in the cozy light and ready to cut. “You wouldn’t be. But he was  _ very  _ familiar with you, Dr. Nohara.” 

“I’m sorry,” Rin says again. It’s all she can think to say.  _ Come back, Tenzo _ , she thinks desperately.  _ I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry _ , but sorry for what? Kakashi is going to be furious. This is exactly what he’d worried about, that Kiri was lying in wait for her to be unprotected. “But- you know me, it seems. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.” 

“How rude of me. I apologize, doctor,” she says, widening her smile. “My name is Mei Terumi. I’m the woman who killed Yagura of the Mist.” 

“ _ Killed- _ ” Rin chokes on air, staring into a flint-cold face. She feels Tenzo’s hand settle on her shoulder. He’s back, just a little too late. She can already hear Obito’s shriek when he finds out about this. 

“Ms. Terumi,” he says, voice steady as ever, gripping Rin’s arm with a firm hand and reassuring her with the warmth of his body so close. “I wouldn’t expect to see you here, so deep in Senju territory.” 

“No,” Mei says, just as smug as she’d been when Rin played dumb earlier. “I suppose you wouldn’t, Tenzo. But it is nice to see your  _ pretty  _ face, I must say. I was just getting…  _ acquainted  _ with your senpai’s sweet girlfriend here. I believe that Kiri owes her an apology.” 

“One could say that,” Tenzo replies, dry as bone. The curve of his cheek is dusted pink, though, and privately, Rin resolves to tell Kakashi about his flustered kohai. If they make it out of here. The more she looks at Mei, the more likely that seems, though. She’s more relaxed with Tenzo here, which doesn’t make much sense to Rin. Her face has opened up, warm and stunning, like rolling fields of summer flowers. They know each other, clearly. There’s history here. Not for the first time, Rin briefly wishes she’d grown up with the Senju the way her boyfriends had, at least so she’d know what’s going on half the time. 

“You don’t have to worry about Kiri anymore,” Mei leans forward, winking at Tenzo salaciously. “Yagura has been dealt with. They answer to me and my swordsmen, now. It was a real shame what they tried to do to the good doctor here and your senpai, and I’d prefer to make it known that I won’t allow behavior like that in my Family.” 

“You know we’ll need proof,” Tenzo grips her arm more firmly, leaning into Rin’s side. “Hashirama may be trusting, but Tobirama and Madara don’t take anyone’s word at face value.” He tenses, as does Rin, when Mei reaches into her coat, but all the other woman pulls out is a flat brown envelope. She slides it across the table with impeccably manicured hands, glistening with silver and rubies. Rin thinks about a time not so long ago when she wouldn’t have been suspicious of what a woman like Mei was going to pull out of her coat and sighs. Her cortisol levels are resigned to being high for the rest of her life, it seems. 

“I had them made in triplicate. One for the Senju, one for the Uchiha, and one for Dr. Nohara so that she can sleep again at night knowing that the  _ scummy _ little man who ordered that scar is dead.” She nods towards Rin’s stomach, under her blouse. Rin has the sudden urge to pull the fabric tight against herself and hide from Mei’s piercing view. She feels, for a second, as though Mei can see the new pink flesh, the blood that stained her hands, the metal of the bullet. And then Rin knows what Mei’s trying to say.  _ Yagura ordered that scar _ . Whether it was an accident when and where it had happened exactly, he ordered them to shoot her that night. It wasn’t a mistake that Kakashi and Obito had avoided the bullet when she shoved them behind that truck. 

“They weren’t going to let me leave that warehouse alive,” Rin breathes, as Tenzo reaches down and takes the envelope, putting it inside his vest. Mei sighs, tapping her nails on the table, and smiles at her with the weight of a thousand sleepless nights strung along her perfect teeth. 

“No,” she says. “They weren’t. But you traded a life for your own, Dr. Nohara, and I can assure you that no man of mine will ever come for you again. If you hadn’t scared them shitless with that little scalpel trick of yours,” she laughs, sliding from the booth and standing with unearthly grace. “Well, I think I finished the job for you.” 

“Kakashi will appreciate this,” Tenzo murmurs, as Mei passes them on her way towards the door. She stops, briefly, to lean up and peck Tenzo on his steadily reddening face. 

“I’m sure he will,” she laughs. “But he’s got this beautiful girlfriend in addition to darling Obito now, I hear.” She taps Tenzo’s chin and turns back towards the door, fire and glee in her eyes. “You can pay his tab for him just like old times,  _ Ya-ma-to _ . You know where to find me when you’re ready to settle that particular debt.” 

* * *

“Yagura is dead,” Tenzo tells Minato later that day, watching his face twitch slightly and settle into his usual placid smile. “Mei Terumi delivered the message herself.” 

“How is Mei?” Minato asks pleasantly, as he opens the envelope and spreads the photos out on the desk. Yagura of the Mist, head separated from his body and laid out on the cold ground, grimace perpetual in his death. It’s a horrible sight, even for two men with their fair share of kills. Tenzo shrugs helplessly, doing his best not to avoid Minato’s knowing gaze, even as the other man laughs. “Bloodthirsty as ever, then.” Minato carefully shuffles the photos back together, pulling out a key ring and opening the hidden drawer under his desk. Tenzo can hear Naruto yelling downstairs, shrieking and laughing while Fugaku’s son, Sasuke, remains noticeably quiet. Life is going on here, despite the fact that Tenzo and Minato have received proof of a coldblooded murder. 

That’s the way things are in the Hidden Families, isn’t it? 

Kakashi and Obito, for all their crimes, for everything they have their hands in for the Family, are living with a semi-civilian girlfriend. Minato and Kushina will be taking Naruto to his first parent-teacher conference soon. Jiraiya is complaining to whoever will listen about Tsunade putting him on a statin for high cholesterol, and Orochimaru made Tenzo babysit so he could go to the grocery store the other week. Even Tobirama is rumored to be moving home soon. There is normalcy everywhere, no matter how one might try to avoid it. 

Tenzo takes the muffin that Kushina presses into his hand when he leaves the house, ruffling Naruto and Sasuke’s hair on his way out, and sits in his car for ten minutes scrolling through contacts trying to decide whether he has that much of a death wish- until he gives it up with a sigh and dials Mei’s number. Years ago, Kakashi had accused his kohai of having a kink for deadly, competent people. Thinking about those photos, no longer burning a hole in his pocket, and the way Mei’s eyes had made him blush in the coffee shop earlier… He has to admit that Kakashi had made a compelling point. 

* * *

Sometimes, things tie themselves up. 

* * *

Perhaps, after everything they’ve been through, the sheer utter banality of seeing all of her new Family in Minato and Kushina’s back yard, having a regular barbecue on a weekend afternoon should be… strange. Rin is finally allowed back in the clinic these days, although she’s always got someone fussing over her at some point in the day. It seems that her clients, both Family and not, had heard about her “unfortunate accident”. She has two boyfriends, both of whom have a number of strange and shadowy jobs. She still goes to the Farmer’s Market, still heads to the gym, still makes herself bento boxes for lunch. Despite the six weeks she spent in a safe house and the scar tissue on her stomach, life is startlingly normal now. She has a place next to Kushina on the deck under the umbrella that Minato carefully set up, and the two of them can receive greetings from each and every one of the Family members that trickle in through the kitchen door.

“I’ve been begging Kakashi and Obito to bring you to one of these for months, you know,” Kushina mentions casually after almost everyone is here, even the older Uchihas. Rin tries to control her blush as the two of them watch Madara deftly evade Hashirama’s attempts at sunscreening everyone. “It’s clear to everyone- well, me, at least, can’t say much about the observation skills of most of these idiots- that you make them happy.” 

“I try to,” Rin says rather helplessly, smiling into her lemonade. “I… they also. Do that,” she coughs lamely, as Kushina giggles away madly. It’s about the seventh variation on a shovel talk she’s gotten in the past few hours from various Family members- even Madara had briefly, obliquely given her yet another one. 

“They had  _ better _ be doing that,” Kushina laughs, although it’s more of a threat if Rin’s ever heard one. “I taught them better, you know.” And they do treat her well. They do make her happy. It’s not a surprising realization- rather a slow dawning, the blush rose of the sun filling the azurine sky, washing over her gently as she watches Kakashi deftly flip Naruto up in the air and fling him directly into Obito, whose laugh booms across the yard. It’s… good. Great. Wonderful. Even Tobirama, whose stern countenance has finally returned from his long term lease in Suna, is smiling watching the children sprint around in circles and try to tackle Shisui. 

They make her happy. 

* * *

They make her happy in  _ so many different ways _ . 

Was it not improbable- nay, impossible, if you had asked her a few months ago- that she would come home to see them sitting on her doorstep (they have a key, obviously, who knows why they didn’t use it) bickering shoulder to shoulder? Well, Obito is doing his best to bicker with Kakashi, who sits there leaning back against her door with his good eye on the book in his lap and apparently no desire to counter Obito’s many grievances. There are a few bags of takeout on the ground at their feet, bundled in Obito’s jacket to keep them warm. Rin looks at Kakashi’s bandaged knuckles and the healing scrape under Obito’s jaw, the faint smudges of ash around Obito’s thumbs as he gestures wildly, nearly whacking his own hand on the door. These boys,  _ her _ boys, wrapped up in dark clothes, all long lines and bad news and something down deep in there that’s sweet only for her, only for each other. 

“Can I open the door?” she asks them, startling Obito. Kakashi just looks up with a crinkled smile underneath his mask, all the adoration in the world just for her, while Obito scrambles to his feet and grabs the takeout, letting her through to the keyhole. She accepts his bent down kiss, ardent and excited, brushing her hand over Kakashi’s hair with one hand and blindly fumbling with her keys with the other. 

“Good day?” Kakashi asks her, as the key clicks home, and her door swings open. He unfolds himself lazily behind them, smacking Obito on the ass audibly and ushering them into her foyer. As soon as the door is shut again, Obito has him against the wall, mouth going a mile a minute back at the same argument they had going when she arrived, now with the added insult of Kakashi smacking him. It’s funny, now that she knows he does it just to see the impassioned look in their boyfriend’s eyes. 

“I’ve had better,” she says, just loud enough to be heard over Obito’s “-and  _ another _ thing!” and Kakashi’s ensuing laughter. The takeout is from her favorite place, still steaming hot. Throwing her coat on the rack, she slips her shoes off into the corner, miniscule looking next to Obito’s boots. Rin leaves them behind in the entryway, padding barefoot into the kitchen to put the takeout on the table and wash the nasty smell of the clinic’s ultra-disinfectant soap off her hands. It lingers even after the full rinse she did at work, sterile and unpleasant in her nose. By the time she’s finished with it, there’s a presence behind her, pressing her warmly up against the countertop. She can smell Kakashi’s herbal shampoo, much better than the bleach and alcohol of the clinic, feeling the familiar crinkle of his mask as he rubs his cheek against her hair. 

“You could let us make it good,” Kakashi suggests slowly, one hand coming up to tug his mask down so he can press his lips to the back of her neck, bared by the headband she wrapped her hair up in this morning. The barest hint of his teeth drag across her skin, down to her shoulder, and she leans back against him with a pleased hum. 

“You’re not hungry, first?” she asks. Obito snorts at them, hopping up on the counter next to the sink to watch. 

“Hungry for  _ pussy _ , probably,” he laughs, kicking at Kakashi’s leg with one socked foot. “It’s all he wanted to talk about this morning.” Kakashi huffs, breath puffing across her jaw as he bites little kisses down her neck, sending shivers through her. 

“That’s projection,” Kakashi murmurs, his hands sliding around her to splay over her stomach, pressing down gently into the cradle of her pelvis, where her nerves start to squirm and knot themselves up with arousal. He’s so gentle across her scar, tracing delicately across it and sending shivers through her. Kakashi is always running cold where Obito is always running hot, cool skin through her shirt, which doesn’t help with the shivers. She loves the way he warms up when they’re together until they meet in the middle, an enamored homeostasis. “Obito started the conversation about it in the first place.” 

“Ye-ah?” Rin manages to stutter out, voice caught in the middle when Kakashi’s knee presses through her thighs, practically lifting her back against him. It’s sometimes infuriating how much taller her boyfriends are than she is, but she can’t help pushing back a little, letting him feel the squeeze of her soft thighs around his long, muscular one. He’s such a pretty scarecrow, their Kakashi. 

“Yeah,” Obito shrugs, scooting closer to them, reaching out with his hand to trail a finger across her lips. “What can I say? I like the way you taste, baby. I missed your thighs around my neck this morning.” 

“You’re  _ such _ a fucking cornball,” Kakashi complains, though they all know he doesn’t mind it. Obito’s eyes have gone dark, and he watches the two of them together with rising intensity that spurs her breath to come faster, faster, faster in her chest. He really kind of is. Obito has learned to talk dirty to them both probably solely from Kakashi’s collection of erotica, has picked up a stream of consciousness that spills from his mouth whenever they get him even slightly hot and bothered. It’s probably teenage Icha-Icha fan Kakashi’s dream- Rin thinks it’s often endearingly obnoxious, but at the end of the day it tends to make its way through her defenses every time whether it’s unbearably corny or not. 

“I like the way you squirm when I pin you down,” Obito hums, pressing his thumb in against her lower lip and letting her catch it between her teeth. “And how you’re always so wet for us, begging for something to fill you up while I suck your sweet little clit-” 

“Obito,” she whines, a little muffled by his thumb, scrunching her eyes shut and shuddering against Kakashi’s suddenly much firmer hold. She can tell Obito’s words are affecting Kakashi too, his hips rocking forward against her almost imperceptibly as his tightly controlled breath puffs against the back of her shoulder. Suddenly, she’s not very hungry for whatever it is they got her for dinner, tonight. 

Dinner is fully forgotten in favor of Obito’s intentions, which are made clear when he shoves Kakashi onto the bed and orders him to strip his clothes off while Obito gets a head start on Rin’s. Off comes her sensible blouse, her khaki chinos, her slightly saggy wash day panties and comfortable bra. It’s nice that they don’t seem to care much about what she wears- Kakashi is more consumed with biting the freckles across her shoulders than anything else, when Obito picks her up and places her back against the pale, scarred expanse of their boyfriend’s chest. He presses his lips to hers, kissing her softly and hungrily in alternate moments, his hands spreading her thighs with confidence and hooking her round knees over Kakashi’s angular ones. 

She can feel Kakashi’s erection against her, a little wet at the small of her back, and his calloused fingers trail up her stomach until he can cup her breast with one cool hand and pinch at her nipple, clearly enthused by the way it makes her hips wiggle back and forth. 

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Kakashi whispers against her throat, like he can’t help himself, holding her steady as he lays back against the pillows and spreads her legs wider until Obito can fit his broad shoulders between them. “We did miss you all day, you know.” Obito grins against her skin, sucking a kiss into the junction of her hip and thigh and sending her hips rocking up helplessly as she moans. He kisses her stomach, bites her gently until she’s pink and writhing and Kakashi’s hand on her chest is holding her in one spot more than anything. 

“Hmm,” Obito hums, shit-eating grin spreading across his face, nuzzling his nose into the little dip between her pubic hair and the curve of her stomach. “I guess I am hungry, Kakashi.” Kakashi huffs a laugh out, slipping his other hand across her hip and combing clever fingers through the curls he finds just under Obito’s lips. Obito grins even wider, and ducks to press the flat of his tongue across her clit. 

“Ooooh,  _ fuck _ ,” she says with feeling, arching her back and slamming a hand down on the bed to grab a handful of her duvet. Obito’s fingers tease at her entrance, slipping just in enough for her to feel them before he slips them out again as he licks at her with single minded intensity. 

“I wanna watch you fuck him,” Kakashi rumbles, his fingers sliding a little with how wet she’s getting, twisting at her poor abused nipple with his other hand and watching their boyfriend eat her out with deadly focus. “Been thinking about it, getting your cock in his ass and shutting his big mouth up with mine.” 

“Yeah?” Rin asks, voice trending higher at the end as Obito bites down a little too hard on her lips at Kakashi’s words, laving over the spot with an apologetic tongue and pressing his face to her with a shaky breath. “I can- that could be arranged,” she breathes, shuddering and rolling her hips up against him because god, fuck, he can take it, he can. It’s easy to make her come like that between them, Kakashi whispering filth in her ear and Obito sucking her clit in sweet little pulses, and afterwards she lies back on the bed with satisfied, stretched out muscles as she watches Kakashi open Obito up for her. 

“You’re such a cockslut,” Kakashi says fondly, watching Obito writhe on three of his fingers, pushing back with desperate noises, nothing left of the brazen man who had said such indecent things to them in the kitchen. “You want us that badly, hmm? Gotta be filled up with both of us? Greedy, B, you always were greedy-” He’s almost incoherent when Rin finally stumbles up on wobbly legs to grab her harness, vacillating between dildos until she decides on the slightly larger, curvier one and fits it through the o-ring. By the time Kakashi has Obito begging on the sheets, she’s gotten the buckles tightened and Kakashi is drawing Obito towards the head of the bed, sitting there like a smug king with Obito’s head between his still slightly slick hands. He kisses Obito silent for a moment, eating him alive, stealing his breath while Rin gets herself into position behind their boyfriend. Her hands look so small on his hips, against his muscular thighs, next to his cock. 

Obito is easy to drag down onto his erection, Kakashi fucking up into his hot, hot, hot mouth while Rin fits the head of her dildo against Obito and slowly, inexorably slides in. Obito chokes a little when she hits home, holding her hips there just to rub across his prostate in teasing, bumping strokes that bring a red flush all the way down his back. She groans a bit at the press of the base of the dildo back against her, at the sight of their tall, muscled, handsome boy split between them. His scars flush pink where his unmarred skin turns red and she traces a fingernail down his scarred side to watch him shiver himself back on her cock, groaning in such a way that Kakashi whines right back and fucks up helplessly into his throat. It’s enough to get her hips really moving, pushing as hard as she can into him and watching him push right back, his thigh muscles clenching and moving in mesmerizing ways. Obito  _ loves _ this, loves being between them, loves giving them both something all at once. 

He is more pliant here, like this, than he ever is unless Kakashi’s managed to fuck him senseless over the course of an entire night. When Kakashi comes, Obito swallows with a glee that almost makes the two of them blush because he never fails to take all of Kakashi’s pedantic, perverted Icha Icha lessons to heart. He presses his hot, sweaty, tear-stained cheek to Kakashi’s thigh and sobs for Rin’s cock, Kakashi threading cruel fingers through his dark curls and yanking just enough to put the other man on the edge. When he reaches back to fist his own erection, Rin smacks him sharply across the thigh, slamming into him with a rough, punishing thrust. She would have been nervous about this before, shy, uncertain. But now, there’s nothing but confidence in the way she slaps his ass in reproach.

“No,” she says kindly, firmly, sternly, dragging sharp nails down his back, relishing in the way he shivers and bucks back into her. “You come on our cocks or you don’t come at all, Obito.” 

And so he does, sweetly and helplessly and incoherently, wailing into Kakashi’s skin and grasping at Kakashi’s thighs and shaking for her as he comes apart, apart, apart. It’s beautiful, everything she wants when she straps up like this. He shudders uselessly when she pulls out and coaxes him down onto the bedspread, buckles jingling while she slowly unstraps the harness. Kakashi is hard again from watching them, knows she’s wet from it, beckoning her closer again when Obito finally rolls off his legs to the side to doze on his favorite of her pillows. 

“Day going better now?” He asks her, gritting his teeth and dropping his head back against the headboard when she slides down on him easy and slow. 

“Yeah,” she huffs, bracing herself and luxuriating in the feeling of him filling her all the way up. “Yeah, I think so.” 

* * *

Yagura of the Mist is buried in an unmarked grave. 

Rin wakes up each day to a better and better world. 


	7. The New Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The new normal is really, really satisfying. Obito is also really, really a little shit.

The ambush is sudden, Obito shoving his leg between Kakashi’s and pressing up against him close enough that they could already be inside one another. And at first, it isn’t apparent what his intentions are, until his fingers slide down Kakashi’s sides and take his hips, one clever thumb brushing against Kakashi’s cock through the fabric of his pants. Perhaps it should have been apparent. Perhaps Kakashi drank more of what was handed to him than he thought he had. 

“What-“ he tries to start, but Obito shushes him with a kiss, biting, deep, hungry. This place is smoky already, some ugly club that Minato needed them to case, and between that and Obito’s spicy cologne his head is spinning a little, air thick in his lungs. Before he manages to think past the whiskey he’s been drinking and his boyfriend’s proximity, Obito is already rocking against him in steady, dirty rolls. He regrets the fourth whiskey a little when his knees go weak at the movement, breath caught in his throat. 

“Oh fuck,” he whines, his forehead hitting Obito’s collarbone, feeling the other man’s laughter rumble through him. It isn’t mean, just hungry and amused and deep enough to send shivers down Kakashi’s spine. This is when Obito’s few inches of height really get him- looming over him, pressing him back into the wall, making him feel small and held and controlled. Obito’s fingers, long and devious and strong, slip around his hip and grip him, hard enough that he knows there will be marks tomorrow. It should hurt (it might hurt?) but all it does is send his hips bucking forward to the thigh wedged up against his cock. 

“You’re really cute,” Obito tells him, lips pressed to his ear, before his wicked sharp canines nip at Kakashi’s neck and fill his throat with a burning need. “Letting me feel you up in the club like one of the bar girls.”

“I hate you,” he murmurs, breathless, hoarse, squirming against Obito’s hold. But it has no bite to it, especially not when Obito nudges the neck of his shirt to the side and bites down on his tender shoulder. “Ahhn- _fuck-_ I- _you-_ “ he stammers out, aware of how high and thready his voice sounds, just audible underneath the music coming from the other end of the dingy hallway. He never fails to fall quickly when Obito corners him like this, and it’s a stark reversal to the way Obito will shiver under him on otherl nights. Something in him is writhing, begging Obito to slam him harder against the grimy bricks and hold him down. 

“Yes?” His stupid boyfriend asks him, biting and sucking at his skin until it turns dark purple, a blooming plum. “Yes, darling?” And oh, god, his voice is so deep, his teeth so sharp, so inviting. One of his hands finds Kakashi’s nipple through the fabric to twist mercilessly at it. His thigh presses so insistently against Kakashi’s cock, and he’s so warm, unrelenting when Kakashi writhes against him, barely able to keep his vision straight. The weight of Obito’s eye patch is rough against his cheek where a flush blossoms like summer wildflowers. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could look Obito in both eyes again. 

“We’re on the clock,” Kakashi manages to gasp out, biting his lip hard enough to bleed when Obito slips teasing fingers under the waistband of his pants. 

“We are,” Obito murmurs, his teeth flashing white in the dim. “We should get off it, so I can do something about this.” He squeezes Kakashi once, swallowing down his helpless whine, and drags him, stumbling, towards the back exit. In the car, Obito dials Rin’s number, putting her on speakerphone as he pulls out of the parking lot with what their girlfriend would probably deem excessive speed. 

“Bito?” She answers just as Obito slides a hand across the center console to grip Kakashi’s thigh, high enough up that his pinky brushes Kakashi’s erection. She’s clearly preoccupied with something, her tone distracted and soft. They can hear the kettle whistling in the background. Kakashi would bet anything that she’s been reading on the couch the whole night. “You need something?”

“I always need something from you,” Obito laughs, making a sharp enough turn that it jostles Kakashi’s leg, shocking a gasp out of him. He’s too hot, overloaded a little and clenching his teeth because of course Obito gets him worked up before they even leave the club. His dick is throbbing, a squirming ball of need in his gut that Obito keeps working back into knots with every subtle brush of his hand. He can’t even pay attention to the road outside the car, the flashing streetlights, but he can guess that they’re on their way to Rin’s. “Specifically, I think Kakashi needs something more, right now, than I do.” 

“Oh?” Rin says, her voice lilting, thickening, sweet like honey. The kettle clicks in the background, whistling trailing off, and they both hear the soft sounds of her footsteps as she walks out of the kitchen. “I thought you boys were on a job tonight.” 

“We were,” Kakashi grits out, shifting in his seat and spreading his thighs in an attempt to ease the pressure in his stomach. It’s a bad move, because Obito just takes it as an invitation- hasn’t that been their whole relationship, though, Obito taking everything Kakashi does as an invitation- and cups Kakashi’s erection with a hot palm, pressing against him. The whine he lets out is startling even to him, and Rin sucks in a breath over the line in such a way that it calls to mind the feeling of spreading her out on her soft pink sheets. 

“Obito,” she says, vague censure in her voice, but they can both practically hear her smile. “Did you finish the job before sticking your hand down Kakashi’s pants?” 

“Of course I did,” Obito says dismissively, grinning wildly over at Kakashi as they stop at a red light. Some part of Kakashi is surprised they actually stopped at all. He squeezes Kakashi again, dragging a guttural noise from his throat. “We’re finished and on our way home to you right now.” 

“How are you feeling, Kashi?” Rin asks, voice gentle. There’s a rustle of fabric, the sound of her mattress, and both of them hiss a little thinking about her lying there waiting for them to get home. Kakashi drops his head back against the seat, grinding his jaw and trying to draw up words as Obito’s grip gets more demanding. 

“Frustrated,” he all but slurs, hips rocking forward without his permission. He recognizes the intersection they’re at. Five minutes from the townhouse. “Obito’s- ugh, _fuck_ , B, I _can’t-_ ” The words get lost in his chest again, heaving out a moan and bucking up when Obito suddenly pulls his hand away. 

“Rin’s talking to you,” Obito murmurs, putting his hand down on the gear shaft like it’s Kakashi’s cock, distracting him even further. 

“I can tell you’re frustrated,” Rin hums. Kakashi imagines her tapping her fingers on the bedspread the way she always does when she’s watching them together, intense and focused on the spaces where their bodies fit against one another. “Obito got you all worked up, hmm?” She breathes out a little giggle, like it amuses her so that Kakashi is huffing in the passenger seat of Obito’s car, his dick making a little wet spot in his briefs and his neck bruising from Obito’s teeth. “At this rate, he’s going to have to carry you into the townhouse, Kashi.” He shifts again, dragging his own hand down his chest and pressing his fingers restlessly against himself, a little lost on how good it feels to have the friction even while Obito growls warningly at him. “Did anyone say you could touch yourself?” Rin says, voice suddenly sharp. 

“I _want_ ,” Kakashi moans, but he manages to stop, rolling his neck a little and clenching his eyes shut. He grabs the fabric of his pants, fingers digging into sensitive skin, because the heat underneath it is uncontrollable, like a tide washing in and over his head. “Riiiiin-”

“I don’t care,” She murmurs, so commanding in a way he cannot refuse. It’s not demanding, nor even particularly stern, but Kakashi shivers to imagine disobeying her. “It’s rude to play with someone else’s toys without asking first.” He whimpers then, shaking against the leather seat, and even Obito moans through gritted teeth at those words. Hers, hers, hers- resounding echoes around the car because fuck, he belongs to _them_. “Be good for me, Kashi, keep your hands to yourself until you get home.” 

“Two minutes out,” Obito says, a little strained, and Rin hums in assent, fabric rustling again in the back. 

“I’ll be waiting for you.” She hangs up, leaving a ringing silence in the car, and Kakashi finally manages to peel his eyes open again. 

“What the fuck did you do to me,” he mutters, shifting restlessly and tapping at his own knee, counting down the blocks to Rin’s townhouse to keep himself from touching his throbbing erection again. Obito smirks, cutting a corner a little close and shaking his head. 

“You’re just easy when you drink whiskey,” he laughs, reaching over to chuck Kakashi under the chin and stroke down his throat. “And you’re _extra_ easy for Rin, all the time.” 

“I _know_ ,” Kakashi groans, leaning forward into Obito’s warm, calloused hand on his neck as Obito easily parks them in front of Rin’s townhouse. He sits there, breathing a little too fast for a moment as Obito turns the car off and unbuckles his seatbelt. He has to wait for Obito to get out, come around and open his door, yanking him to his feet unsteadily and pulling him into a biting kiss. The walk to the porch, getting inside, yanking his clothes off, stumbling to Rin’s bedroom and taking in the sight of their girlfriend spread out naked on the bed- it’s all a bit of a blur. He stands there in the doorway, drinking in the way the dim bedside lamp reflects off of her smooth thighs, the curve of her hips, the delicate angle of her ankles where they’re hooked over one another. He loves the way her breasts angle outwards when she lies on her back, plush skin pressing against her strong arms and leaving a pale, thin-skinned place he wants to kiss right between them, right over her heart. He can already feel the give of her soft stomach against his mouth, the way her ribcage feels beneath his fingers when he presses up from the enticing dip of her waist, how sweetly she pulls on his hair when he takes her dark nipples gently between his teeth. 

Obito wraps long fingers around his hips, shoving him towards the bed, and they both lose track of things a little bit when Rin sits up, watching the way her breasts move, her nipples hardening visibly as she watches them with dark eyes. She slides to the edge of the bed, patting the mattress beside her (that firm, wonderful, _huge_ mattress Obito and Kakashi bought her when they first started dating.) 

“Don’t keep her waiting,” Obito rumbles, urging him forward again, until Kakashi is bending his legs and crawling up and Rin’s soft hand on his head urges him down, pressing his cheek to the sheets while Obito’s hands yank his hips up none-too-gently. Kakashi bites the sheet and groans when she reaches under him and her other hand wraps loosely around his cock, a thin line of precome dripping down onto the mattress. 

“What did you do to him, ‘Bito?” Rin asks, surprised to see him this worked up already, her lips dragging across his shoulder, leaving prickling fire under his skin. Obito presses a hot palm to Kakashi’s inner thigh, pushing his legs further apart and grinning smugly. 

“That’s what he asked, too,” he scrapes nails up Kakashi’s leg until his hand presses to his boyfriend’s ass, forcing his lower back to arch up even more. “I just ordered him whiskey on the rocks.” Rin practically giggles, fingernails dragging torturously along Kakashi’s erection as her breasts press to his side. 

“Please,” Kakashi whines, muffled by the bed, his hips wiggling helplessly like he can’t decide whether to move into Rin’s teasing grip or press back up against Obito’s erection. “ _Please-_ ”

“He’s more polite than usual like this,” Rin says conversationally, winding her fingers tighter in Kakashi’s hair and pushing his face further into the sheets. Obito just laughs, leaving his hips to hump back uselessly as the taller man gets off the bed to rummage in the bedside table. Kakashi wants to whimper, to whine, to beg because please, it was so nice to be pressed between them, but Rin’s tight grip on his head has his vision swimming and his cock twitching helplessly enough that he can barely breathe, let alone make a coherent sound. 

“I know,” Obito replies, triumphantly tossing a tube of lube onto the bed. “Doesn’t it just make you want to give him something nice?”

“It does,” she murmurs, using her fingers in his hair to yank him upwards inexorably, until he’s on his hands and knees panting in her face, cheeks bright pink and mouth hanging open uselessly. “Hi, pretty boy,” she whispers, kissing the beauty mark just below his mouth. It’s soft, so soft, so sweet until it’s abruptly not and he’s making a high-pitched pathetic noise because she takes his swollen lower lip between her perfect teeth and _bites_ . Kakashi melts into her, skin on skin on skin on skin and teeth dragging stinging hot pleasure, stalling his lungs out, making a puddle of his brain. “Hmm,” Rin hums, kissing his slack mouth a little unsteadily, her thighs pressing together with a slick sound. “I believe I said something earlier about this being _my_ toy to play with.” She grips his wet erection firmly, swiping a thumb cruelly over the flushed tip and watching him as he fucks into her hand once before managing to stutter to a stop. 

“It is,” Obito answers for Kakashi, sprawling out beside them with a hungry, devious smirk on his face. “Isn’t it, darling?” Normally, Kakashi protests a bit at Obito calling him that, calling him darling like he’s some lithe, sweet girl that Obito’s smooth-talking at a gala or whatever, but it sounds so nice falling from his lips now, cutting through the haze in Kakashi’s brain because he wants to be their darling so _badly_ in this moment. Rin’s grip on Kakashi’s hair loosens enough that he can fall forward a little, press his face to Rin’s pink flushed chest and mouth his way to her nipple with eager lips, nodding in assent. 

“I want it inside me,” she says, breath hot on his forehead, and Kakashi barely manages to stop himself from bucking forward against her again. Obito pushes him over onto his back easily, warm hands roaming frenetically over his thighs as Rin swings a leg over Kakashi’s waist and braces herself on his chest. He could look at her forever like this, staring down at him like she’s going to eat him alive, the generally mild-mannered doctor by daylight driven here forcibly in the throes of her lust for the two of them. Obito looks so good behind her, hooking his chin over her shoulder, kissing her neck gently and helping her straddle Kakashi. Kakashi gasps helplessly at the feeling of Obito’s hand on him, even as Rin shudders and moans above him, Obito’s other hand slipping down the front of her stomach and spreading her open for Kakashi’s cock. Her clit is swollen, pretty pink and slick and something Kakashi would very much like his mouth on. He parts his lips almost instinctively, knows exactly what it would be like to bury his nose in her damp brown curls and press her open with his tongue, but he loses the thread badly when Obito starts coaxing her down on him and that familiar hot clenching wetness drags all coherency from his brain. 

Her fingers find their way into his open mouth anyway, something for him to suck on uselessly as he tries desperately not to fuck up into her without any sense of rhythm, trembling with the strain of staying still. Obito grins down at him, delighted by how overly gone he is, how incapable he is of anything but the barest minimum of her direction, even as his boyfriend fits hungry teeth against the curve of their girlfriend’s shoulder. 

“I don’t think he’s going to last,” Rin says shakily, even as she thrusts her fingers into Kakashi’s mouth and rocks down against him with a breathy sigh, like that will help drag him back from the looming edge in any way. Sometimes, he thinks he could come just from her fucking his mouth mercilessly without any regard for his comfort, talking him off with Obito at her side, saying filthy things that set fires in his gut. She crams those careful fingers down against his tongue, against his teeth, the fingers he’s seen stitch Obito up and felt expertly palpating his day old bruises. 

“That’s okay,” Obito rasps, his knees shoving Kakashi’s legs even wider as he cozies up to Rin’s back, sliding clever fingers in a ruthless circle across her swollen clit and shocking a whine from her. She clenches unthinkingly down on Kakashi, who in turn bucks up and squirms, and Obito just delights in the chain reaction he can cause with a simple twitch of a fingertip. “Let him come, then. He can get you wet enough to take me.” Rin shakes on top of him, grinding down, dragging breathless whimpers from Kakashi’s chest as she starts to ride him with a stuttering, desperate intensity. It’s something of a shared thing that she and Kakashi have, a fascination and appreciation for just how fucking big Obito’s cock is. Size queens in different ways, Genma once said. Kakashi doesn’t give a fuck what anyone calls it, he just knows that it feels amazing when his boyfriend fucks him, and that their girlfriend makes the best desperate, incoherent noises when Obito is inside her. 

Kakashi wants to see Rin come on him, he really does, but he can’t think past the hazy tightness in his groin or how good she feels on him or how he can smell how wet she is and it’s a little too much for his still tipsy brain. He doesn’t know how long it takes, but Obito comes through for both of them and keeps slipping wet circles on Rin’s clit, sliding down to brush against the place where Kakashi disappears inside her every once in a while, until she tightens further and further and further and shatters apart with a stuttering, breathless cry. That’s enough for him, since he was barely hanging on by a thread before anyway, and he grabs her hips with clutching, weak hands, dragging her down on him so he can groan and come hard enough that it makes his head feel like it’s been stuffed with cotton. Obito, bastard that he is, rocks Rin down on him a little longer, relishing in Kakashi’s oversensitive whimpers and Rin’s shuddering, shaking convulsions. 

“Okay, _okay_ , I- I-” Rin stutters, voice high and broken as Obito rubs a merciless thumb across her clit, dragging the hood back and exposing it fully to the now-warm air of her bedroom. “ _Obito_ ,” she wails, clenching her thighs around Kakashi’s waist and arching back. The way she clamps down on his overstimulated dick punches the breath out of him, watching her eyes water and her cheeks flush bright red as Obito bites a purple mark right up under her jaw where she’ll never be able to hide it. Kakashi thanks whatever higher power that’s listening for the fact that their jobs keep them fit because it’s mesmerizing to watch Obito use one arm to lift Rin effortlessly up off Kakashi’s lap and drop her down so easily on his own, sliding his cock obscenely through her slick pussy to bump against her clit where he presses fingers to it still, red and throbbing. 

“I can feel him dripping from you,” Obito murmurs. Kakashi makes a weak, raspy noise at that- at the image of it all, because he can _see_ where his come is slowly sliding down Obito’s length, he can see Rin clenching on nothing and oh, fuck, he’s going to get hard again much sooner than he thought. Obito cocks his hips back just enough, tilts her forward, and slides into her with a guttural noise of pleasure that makes Kakashi’s dick twitch violently. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rin says, with feeling, Obito finally leaving her overstimulated clit alone for a moment to press against her lower stomach in that way that Kakashi knows leaves them both feeling the full pressure of his erection, overly full and split wide open. 

“Okay, princess?” Obito asks, thick honey and smoke like the aftertaste of Kakashi’s favorite scotch. Suddenly, Kakashi feels cold, wanting so profoundly to feel their skin against him again. Rin gasps for a moment, nodding as Obito presses his hand against her even further, pink skin around his scarred fingers, and fucks his hips up into hers with an obscenely slick sound. “You’re so fucking _wet_ ,” he hisses, rocking her down to meet his thrusts, “God, fuck, gonna get you full again.” Kakashi groans in tandem with Rin’s high, thready whine, her eyes clenching shut and her head falling back against Obito’s shoulder as though her neck can’t bear to hold it up any longer. He reaches up, grabby hands grasping towards them, mouth incapable of cooperating enough to fully ask for what he wants. Obito huffs breathlessly against Rin’s shoulder, watching him beg wordlessly for their skin, dragging fingers down Rin’s arm until he can twine their hands together. “We really fucked you stupid, huh?” Obito asks him, when he can’t seem to muster up even a single ‘please’. Kakashi tightens his thighs, squeezing in on Obito’s legs in answer, dragging him just a little bit closer. 

“I’m gonna put you down,” Obito murmurs raspily, licking a wet stripe up Rin’s neck, biting at the bruises he’s already left there. “Kakashi’s getting lonely.” And Rin laughs brokenly, little moans escaping her throat as Obito tilts her forward and lets her fall into Kakashi’s arms, her mouth finding Kakashi’s. Obito scoots up, never letting himself fully out of her, and grabs her hips with deceptively gentle hands, tightening his grip slowly until he’s sure there will be delicate little cherry blossom fingerprints on the plush curve of them tomorrow morning. Kakashi feels Obito’s first unforgiving thrust into Rin like it’s inside _him_ , the choked sound of Rin’s surprise against his tongue, the way she shakes and curls her fingers into the sheets beside his head. 

“Oh, oh, _oh-_ ” she repeats, face screwed up, lips trembling because fuck, Obito can get so _deep_ in this position, bottoming out in some tender place, sending shockwaves quaking through all the way up to her throat. He drags against her front wall, obscene and slick and dripping down her thighs onto Kakashi’s tense abdomen, building up this pressure inside her that tightens behind her pubic bone until she’s gasping for it. Kakashi’s hard again, the tip of his erection rubbing against Rin’s navel. He drags his teeth across her swollen lower lip, nuzzles her nose with his, watching her come apart totally on top of him, filled with such ardent and sudden devotion to her and Obito. Obito’s practically growling, spitting obscenities, bent over her with his teeth on the back of her neck, marking purple across her shoulder blades, enamored with the way he can grab the soft pad of fat that rests atop her hip bones and use it to drag her into him. 

“Gimme another one, Rin,” Obito rasps, his cruel fingers teasing her clit again, never letting up. “Come on, let us see it, come for us again-” Rin breaks with a wail, gushing hard enough that Kakashi can feel it dripping, Obito’s cock fitted as deep as it can be, splitting her open as she shakes and shakes and shakes. With a tight groan, Obito rocks forward into the hot, shuddering waves of her orgasm, hips stuttering as he spends himself, fingernails digging crescent moons into her tan skin. Rin slumps down on Kakashi’s chest, trapping his erection between them, and it should be frustrating but really Kakashi’s just filled with a wondrous fluttering in his chest at the way their bodies fit together. She’s so warm, beautiful and flushed and sweating and smelling like them. _This_ is what he wanted to come home to, as soon as he’d heard her voice over the phone in the car. After a few moments of heavy breathing, Obito straightens up, pulling his softening cock from her with a thick, indecent noise. Kakashi feels more than hears the vibrating whine Rin lets out when Obito gets the palm of one hand flat up under her pubic bone, pulling her hips back and up and open until he can watch their come dripping out of her with an entirely self-satisfied look on his face, pervert that he is. His brain is going too slow to connect the dots fast enough when he feels Rin’s teeth bite down on his collarbone, her whole body going stiff and trembling when Obito shuffles his knees back and dips down behind her until all Kakashi can see is the mussed curls on top of his head over the curve of Rin’s ass. 

“ _Oh-_ Obit-ooooh-” she grits out, panting and digging her teeth into Kakashi’s skin, grinding them back and forth until the shock of pain leaves his hips bucking up again, rubbing his erection against her warm, damp stomach. 

“What?” Obito asks, like he can sound innocent when he’s got his mouth muffled, pressed to her pussy as he licks a filthy trail up from her clit to her open, red hole. “We taste good together, baby,” he grins, resting his chin on her ass with his mouth all salacious and wet. “We should give Kakashi a taste, hmm? Since he’s been good for us, so far.” 

“Jesus,” she pants, but she acquiesces to Obito’s gentle, firm hands lifting her up and laying her out like a buffet specifically made to entice tall, lanky, irreputable men with a penchant for wearing face masks and an insatiable oral fixation. She’s so wet and open, flushed and pink and hot for both of them, that Kakashi finds himself drooling a little bit thinking about it. Obito coaxes him from his spot, helping Kakashi lay between her slick thighs as Obito grabs the tube of lube and settles himself behind the other man. It’s exactly what Kakashi had wanted earlier, when Obito exposed her to both of them and slipped Kakashi’s cock up into her so perfectly- so he falls on her like the starved, begging man he is, fitting his lips softly around her clit and twining his fingers in her damp curls, one arm curving up under her thigh to hold her open enough that he might devour her whole. Obito’s right. They do taste good together, honey and salt and bitterly perfect and probably disgusting but Kakashi’s never, ever claimed not to be a disgusting man, has he?

Obito’s thick fingers make a cold trail along the curve of Kakashi’s ass just as Rin’s hands find a weak hold in his silver hair, yanking him forward against her with a shuddering roll of her hips. He pushes back against Obito’s hand, groaning at the drag of his erection across the sheets, parting his thighs as much as possible so that he can feel the catch of Obito’s thumb against his hole. Obito makes a delighted sound at Kakashi’s display, pressing in inexorably with a slick finger until Kakashi’s hips are rocking into him unconsciously, without any coaxing from Obito at all. The force of Kakashi’s moan when Obito comes fucking back in with two fingers, then three vibrates across Rin’s clit, his open panting mouth pressed to her unmoving for a moment as he gets his bearings. A giggle quakes down through her stomach, thighs tightening around Kakashi’s head and fingernails scraping his scalp. 

“He-- uh, he really-” she breathes, letting her head fall back against the pillow, red ink spread under her skin all the way down to her navel. “He l-likes that a lot, Obito-”

“Oh, I know,” Obito murmurs darkly, crooking his fingers and shocking a high whine from Kakashi’s chest, one hot palm pulling his hips up just as he had with Rin. Kakashi shivers when Obito drizzles more cold lube down the crack of his ass, wet and sloppy and a little bit gross, just the way he likes to fuck Rin (which, Obito has always been the messiest of them, it’s not surprising that he wants them filthy and disorganized and slippery underneath him.) He’s hard again too, erection hard and hot on the back of Kakashi’s thigh. 

“Well then,” Rin moans, writhing her hips up into Kakashi’s eager mouth, luxuriating in the way he laves his tongue over her in long, adoring strokes. “Give it to him, B.” 

“Mother fu-uh-uucker-” Kakashi whines out against her thigh, panting helplessly when Obito presses into him in one smooth stroke and doesn’t even give him a second to adjust before slamming out and back in again. 

“You love it,” Obito teases, growly and gravelly and perfectly hot inside him as he fucks Kakashi within an inch of his goddamn life. “You love _us_.” 

“I do, I do, I do,” he sobs, allowing Rin to pull him back in even further, pressing his enamored mouth to her and trying his best to get her to the edge a third time. As Obito picks up the pace, Kakashi manages to slide three fingers into her and curl up, drag them against her clenching, trembling walls and suck- He shudders, shakes, groans because he can’t last, god-fucking-damn it, with the taste of her in his mouth and Obito slamming into his prostate and his oversensitive dick dragging across the covers. 

When she comes, incoherent whimpers and thighs tight enough to nearly choke him out, Kakashi follows her, and Obito follows him, a chain reaction of vulnerability that leaves them all twitching, melted into the duvet in a pile of overheated, flushed, sweaty skin. They drift for a while, content to just lie where they’ve fallen, letting themselves get sticky because the mind might want a shower but the body is extremely unwilling. Until Obito’s phone rings on the bedside table, lighting up and vibrating obnoxiously. 

“H’lo?” Obito says, rather groggily, only to hear Minato’s relieved sigh on the other end. 

“You never checked in, and Kakashi isn’t answering his phone.” Minato says, clearly talking quietly because it’s- a glance at the clock tells him just past midnight- and Naruto is likely asleep. 

“Oh, fuck,” Obito says, a lot more clearly. “I’m sorry, Minato-sensei, I promise we’re fine.” He looks back at Kakashi and Rin, splayed out and still dozing together, and stifles a laugh. “Kakashi just had a little too much to drink, that’s all. Had to get him home and to bed.” 

“Hmm,” Minato sounds like he’s suppressing a laugh. “Well, make sure the good doctor takes care of him for us, alright?” Obito’s about to protest, before he remembers that Minato tracks their phones, so he just scrambles through a slightly embarrassed goodbye and hangs up before Minato can say anything else and flops back on the bed. Fuck. Maybe Kakashi was right when he accused Obito of only thinking with his dick last week. Obito crawls back towards his lovers, watching Rin’s eyes open blearily and focus on him with a soft, fond smile. Her fingers card through Kakashi’s sweaty hair, the younger man nuzzling into her with a barely audible sound of contentment. 

“Shower?” he says quietly. 

“Yeah,” Rin replies, all contentment and lazy afterglow and long drawling syllables that she only has when she’s extremely sleepy or extremely satisfied. He fairly purrs at the sound of them, of her voice like that, knowing they gave that to her. “That sounds perfect.” 

Things are really, really good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for going on this little self-indulgent journey with me, guys! Please let me know if there are things you're interested in seeing in this universe in the future- I'm really into writing it! It's very fun for me and I will likely put out some more small smut oneshots and other things to do with this, maybe even a sequel or a focus on other couples as well! You can find me over @ slowkage on tumblr.


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